This Is So Cool

Via Shaker TheDeviantE, here is an amazing story about Stanford Professor Manu Prakash and his students developing a portable, super-cheap paper microscope called the FoldScope, which could radically change the availability of diagnostic tools around the world.

Manu Prakash, a professor at Stanford University and his students have developed a microscope out of a flat sheet of paper, a watch battery, LED, and optical units that when folded together...creates a functional instrument with the resolution of 800 nanometers – basically magnifying an object up to 2,000 times.

[The FoldScope] is extremely inexpensive to manufacture, costing between fifty-cents and a dollar per instrument. And because the microscope is assembled primarily from paper and optical components the size of a grain of sand, it is virtually indestructible.

Foldscope also differs from the microscopes typically found in science labs because it's not only portable, but it also has the ability to project an image on any surface, allowing a larger group of people the ability to look at an image simultaneously.

Prakash is hoping that because the Foldscope is so cheap to manufacture and easy to assemble that everyone will have access to the world of microscopy and one day every kid will have a Foldscope in their backpacks or tucked away in their pocket.

Extraordinary. How exciting!