Category: Materials
Anything related to non-biological or biological materials
Our Latex experiments
We wondered what the white latex of a Ficus plant would look like under a Foldscope. Here is the experiment in 5 short videos Video 1/5: Latex in Ficus elongatus. Video 2/5. We spread the latex onto the slide. We had two slides, one in which we really stirred the latex and the other…
Yellow synthetic feathers
Yellow Synthetic feather
Nothing is sharp even if paper cuts your hand
Recently i got a paper cut in my finger while i was writing my assignment. I asked myself how is this even possible DROP ASSIGNMENT TAKES THE PAPER OPENS BOX TAKE THE FOLDSCOPE MINDBLOWN. Though it was cut highly presise by machines in the industry , its not. I was even able to see the…
Plosyter vs cotton
I just now got my foldscope ..(MANU SIR you’re really a genius.😮.) The first thing I wanted to see was a pixels in a display.(I’m still working on it) Getting to the topic topic …I saw a post by one of the members where he took a single strand of a cotton thread when under…
Video: Middle School Tech Review
Real tools lead to real work at Opportunity Middle School in Concord, NC. Using microscopes, foldscopes, and laser lens hacked cheap fire tablets, our students are opening up their world, all on their own. With only a couple of takes after stumbling over the term “microscope,” these 7th and 8th graders free-styled this video to…
Microcosms of marine plastic debris
Hello Foldscope Community, I am Mandy Barker a photographer from the UK who has been photographing marine plastic debris recovered from the world’s oceans for many years. The motivation for my work is to raise awareness about the vast amount of plastic entering our oceans, affecting ecosystems, biodiversity, marine life and ultimately ourselves. Using the Foldscope I…
Microfluidics: a primer
This post is going up a little before I’d like, in that I’ve made a few steps towards a tool for the Foldscope, but the tool isn’t easy to use or refined yet. A teacher I work with outside of Denver, Colorado that does an amazing job of letting students really taste whats its like…
How to Build a Plankton Net
Although one of the best things about our explorations with the Foldscope is that you can pretty much find your subjects anywhere you look, occasionally it is helpful, when looking for specific groups of critters, to build a little bit of extra equipment to help you along the way. One of these that I have…
Foldscope Mod: Standing on the shoulders of giants
Today I wanted to see if I could make my folscope a little more smartphone friendly. While the folded housing of the scope is fantastic for fixed slides and direct hand-to-human-eye microscopy, I’ve had some difficulty when it comes to taking pictures with the camera on my phone. The issues are: Too many moving parts!…
Tinkering around with a DIY LED mount
Hi Foldscope Community! I’m Carrie, another graduate student in the California State University, Monterey Bay class that was lucky enough to receive Foldscopes this semester! When we were first constructing our scopes, we didn’t have enough LED switches and mounts to go around – not a problem! Our professor, Dr. Kerry Nickols, handed out some…
Plankton at Gantry State Park
After a long cold snap at the end of the winter, and a pretty rainy spring, this week has finally brought in some sunny and warm days. I happen to be on spring break this week from one of the institutions I call home, so I took the time off to go fishing. It’s not…
prof premraj pushpakaran
prof premraj pushpakaran
Getting Started with my Foldscope
I’m happy to be joining the Foldscope community today! Having received one through a connection with one of my graduate professors, I can’t wait to take this bad boy out for a spin. While I’d assume everyone here has had the opportunity to put theirs together, for my first blog post I wanted to share…
Time Lapse
This post doesn’t feature any images taken with a Foldscope, but it’s part of an area of interest I came to as a result of our microcosmic investigations. As with the environment itself, it’s sometimes helpful to see the kinds of scientific investigation we do with the microscopes as part of a larger observation of…
Compounding a foldscope
Here is a problem that might adorn entrance examination tests someday. It originated in a dream that I had a few days ago. I suspect this dream was inspired by the SLR hack of the foldscope. The low power lens of the foldscope can magnify objects ~140 times. The low power of a typical compound…
Arthropod Soil Biodiversity and Foldscope-DSLR Camera Hack
It has been a while since my last post on butterfly wing scales – since then I’ve been thinking up some directions to apply the Foldscope to a more in-depth study on biodiversity in the Amazon rainforest. When I initially played with the Foldscope in the jungle, I had the idea to take one scoop of soil to see what…
Don’t judge a book by its cover…
There are many advertisements in the form of magazine booklets which come in the mail every day. Usually they just come and go in my house, but this time I decided to look at a sample from one under my Foldscope. I was expecting to see the one uniform maroon color I saw with my…
Introducing Other Teachers to Foldscopes!
video using foldscope, observing local pond water After bringing the foldscopes to the teacher training class the professor wanted to keep my foldscope – Umm, NO! Everyone quickly agreed how useful the foldscopes would be when taking students out into the field for observations.
Great starter slide
Feathers through the foldscope. I found that the feathers are easiest for new users to focus on.
About the time I used Foldscope for the first time
So I attended the first workshop Dr. Manu did in collaboration with the Gov of India. Honestly, It was a day of mixed feelings. I am a biology major, and I have used a microscope so many times; I lost count. Although I had heard of the foldscope earlier, I thought that it might not…
The stratum corneum
I have been wanting to do this experiment ever since I saw Manu’s post on volcanoes on his skin and the tatoo post. I essentially wanted to stain my skin and foldscope it. I had a somewhat erroneous idea that I might see some nucleated cells. I just had to do the experiment to see what…
Food for a nation – what’s in my “Atta”
I have lots of memories of taking wheat grains to the “atta mill” – called Chakka. It used to be a tough job – I was small (only 10 maybe) and me and my brother would manage a bag of grains on a pedal bike and take it to the mill. We would wait for…
Silver Crystals Using Tollens’ Test Reagents
Have you ever seen the Silver Mirror trick at a chemistry show? That’s when silver is precipitated out of solution onto a glass surface. The demo consists of a series of clear solutions being combined in a glass flask. As the presenter swirls the flask, a shiny mirror forms on the inner surface of the…
Pretty Powder- Emily
This is a face powder. I simply used a brush to apply the translucent powder to the cellophane tape, then put the slides under the Foldscope. One can see the slight shimmer affect it gives off, and though it looks incredibly fine, when one looks at it under the Foldscope it is, in fact, grainy…
The Structure of a Bee Wing and How It Affects Flight (BioE Spr2015)
How can bees fly? One of my favorite quips is that scientists long ago succeeded in determining that bees cannot fly. Indeed, I always loved the way bees fly, like they are dangling a great mass beneath frantically flapping wings. We set out to explore the question: how does the structure of a bee’s wing…
Throwie LED as Foldscope light source
when we shipped the first batch of Foldscope; we made the decision of including only a limited number of light modules. The rational was to encourage users to do day-light outdoors microscopy. Since most of these packages were going to far away places; we were worried about if the battery might get screened. Here I…
red
Red
Effect of Electrolysis on Rust
Students in the CTE Autobody Careers performed electrolytic rust removal on old parts. These are images of the rust and residue collected before and after the treatment.