Remember when you were back in Chemistry lab and you were handed a microscope? This heavy, bulky thing was the Batman symbol of scientists, and looked really intense, and took the whole semester to figure out. Plus, the teacher was really anal about not dropping them (you would be too if you paid $1000 for each).
A professor from Stanford, Manu Prakash, wasn’t having it anymore. Him and his students basically flipped the whole expensive microscope concept on it’s head, creating a low-cost (only 50 cents), portable, and genius product called the Foldscope.
Similar to the sustainability valued at Superego, Foldscope did the same, as the microscope is made from cardstock, a watch battery, LED, and optical units to magnify an object 2000x. You can literally print it out and fold it. On top of that, it can project the image onto a surface so all your homies can take a look.
The vision for Foldscope (pun intended) is to make microscopy accessible to the world and help identify diseases such as Malaria, before it’s too late.
Check out the convincing argument by Manu Prakash himself:
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