Brilliant Minds

[Chris James]

From the wonderful people in university labs we have a brilliant breakthrough in diagnostic equipment like you have never seen before: the microscope.

Watch the video and be amazed: http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/this-could-be-big-abc-news/super-cheap-paper-microscope-could-save-millions-lives-133616732.html?vp=1

[Addym Kehris]

OMG! Yup, leave it to Chris to find shit like this. LOL. And it's brilliant.

[Merkin]

Maybe if we diverted a little of the billions we assign to foreign aid into supporting this kind of research and development we could have a much greater impact and serve humanity.

[colinian]

Very cool.

Colin

[DesDownunder]

In cynical mode: Some big Corporate will buy up the rights and then lock the whole thing up so that only their very expensive microscope will be available for mega$

[colinian]

A Big Corporate can't do a buyout of the rights. I read on the internet that the design has been placed in the public domain.

Colin

[DesDownunder]

That's encouraging, thanks Colin.

[colinian]

From the website www.foldscope.com:

Foldscope: Microscopy for everyone

We are a research team at PrakashLab at Stanford University, focused on democratizing science by developing scientific tools that can scale up to match problems in global health and science education. Here we describe Foldscope, a new approach for mass manufacturing of optical microscopes that are printed-and-folded from a single flat sheet of paper, akin to Origami.

New: We are currently looking for beta-testers for Foldscope. We will be choosing 10,000 people who would like to test the microscopes in a variety of settings and help us generate an open source biology/microscopy field manual written by people from all walks of life. See "Ten Thousand Microscopes signup" for details.

If you have an interest and an idea about how this type of microscope can be used, click on the signup link above and send them your idea. You might end up being a beta tester!

Colin