Foldscope: The Paper Microscope

Foldscope is an ultra-affordable paper microscope which can be folded with a sheet of paper.

Foldscope is created with a vision to solve the accessibility problem in Science. It is designed to be portable and durable while performing on par with conventional research microscopes (140X magnification and 2 micron resolution). Foldscope which began as a simple idea has now grown into a company that provides low cost tools to communities around the world to discover the world around and interpret it their own way.

Foldscope Basic Kit (FBK) - Fundoo Labs

A foldscope is an optical microscope that can be assembled using simple components like sheet of papers and lens. It is developed by Manu Prakash and designed to cost less than US$1 to build. It is the part of the frugal science movement which aims to make cheap and easy tools available for scientific use in the developing world. The mission is to break down the price barrier between people and the curiosity and the excitement of scientific exploration!

With the development of foldscope many wonders of the microscopic world are at our fingertips! We can see very tiny bacterias, cells, singe cellular organisms as well as larger things like insects, fabrics, leaves, small tissues and many more.

PLOS ONE: Foldscope: Origami-Based Paper Microscope

Foldscope allows us to have a window to a microscopic world. Literally everything around us is built up of microscopic parts. You are a bag of trillions of cells walking, talking and eating!! But individulaly these are tiny little pieces working together. Any sets of problems you can see like diseases, food, agriculture, physics many of these boils down to making measurements at microscopic scale to understand what is actually happening.

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