Bilguudei Naranbaatar

Hello everyone! My name is Bilguudei (Billy) Naranbaatar. I am a fourth year undergraduate student at UCLA majoring in Molecular Cell and Developmental Biology. I am also from Mongolia, a country that is almost entirely open steppe, and populated by a still nomadic people. One of my main goals in studying in the United States is to help advance Mongolia in any way possible, by alleviating pollution, fighting desertification, improving education, etc. Thus, when I came across your lecture on the Foldscope while perusing through TED talks, I saw an opportunity for its use in Mongolia. I got in contact with Dr. Prakash, to share my ideas. The following is an excerpt of what I envisioned for the use of Foldscopes in Mongolia.
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 “There are several possible uses that I can currently see for Mongolia. First is, of course, educational. Many of the schools in Mongolia, even Universities and private colleges in the capital, lack the equipment necessary to provide each and every student with the resources to fully explore the world around them in a microscopic scale. If any, they have very few microscopes, enough for only one or two students to use at a time, not counting the professors that would likely reserve them for their own research. However, with the Foldscope, every student can have their own microscope, to explore the microscopic world as they see fit.


 I remember when a friend of my mothers, a high school teacher, brought me a light microscope, it made me fall in love with science. I was looking through the window into the microscopic world every chance I got. I want students in Mongolia to have the same opportunities. I want them to explore through their own eyes, not just through pages in a book, and this is just for schools in the city. In the countryside, children tend the herds, ride horses, milk cows, and if they’re lucky, go to school in the small nearby village. They learn to read and write, but they are never given the opportunity to fall in love with science or math or whatever other subject they may find their passion in. With the foldscope, the potential uses in this kind of environment are endless. I could just imagine it: young children, herding sheep and cattle, stop near the lake to water the herd and notice something interesting on the ground, a unique type of grass, a small fungus, or even just a seemingly normal patch of mud. They then pull out their foldscope and analyze the sample on the spot, learning through their own exploration, asking questions – with hopefully teachers to answer them (but that’s another issue altogether). My country could be filled with nomadic scientists, learning and exploring the world around them without having to forego their traditional lifestyle.


 Aside from their educational use, there are of course medical uses, veterinary uses, and uses in general research. The foldscope could especially be of great use in on-site field research trips like this to remote locations in Mongolia, where electricity is scarce and light, durable equipment is necessary. The difference between on site analysis of samples and off site with significant delays can be night and day, especially when viewing live samples.”


 Thankfully, my ideas resonated with Dr. Prakash and I was given several foldscopes as samples to spread and share in my country, last summer. Though I didn’t have as much time as I had hoped to use the foldscope in the countryside of Mongolia, I did manage to get a few good images and used it for some alarming research. I will be sharing these images and findings soon! I also have a few interesting ideas on possible improvements and other applications, that I will be sharing in upcoming posts! I am excited to be a part of this community and look forward to sharing ideas and conversing with all of you!

The Nomadic Scientist

Saving the Ganga Lake

When I first got my hands on the foldscope, I was blown away. It was one thing to see someone else using it, and to see the images they got from it, but it was a whole new experience seeing it happen for myself. It seems almost impossible that such as small, simple device could do something so amazing. Many of the scientists in Mongolia I shared it with were equally amazed. The most amazing thing to me is the lens. The fact that a single lens can magnify incoming light by 140, 400, and even 2000 (as mentioned in Dr. Prakash’s papers) is extraordinary! Normally, that kind of magnification requires multiple lenses to achieve. And that got me thinking: can’t we increase this resolution further by just adding another lens on top of the foldscope lens?


 Of course, the 2000x magnification cannot be further increased due to the diffraction limit of light. However, the 140 and 400x foldscopes can potentially be supplemented using another lens on top of it. Now this seems a bit difficult. The reason the foldscope is so cheap and simple, yet very rugged and durable is that it doesn’t have too many parts. It is flat and doesn’t have any extra breakable parts. So adding a second lens to the foldscope seems to mostly defeat the purpose. Then, the iPhone 7 came out. Though I’m more of an android user myself (All my microscopy images are taken with the Nexus 6P camera), the iPhone 7 gave me an interesting solution: use the camera to magnify the image. Now normally, phone cameras aren’t capable of real zoom – they use digital zoom, relying on a high resolution to prevent distortion when zooming. The iPhone 7, on the other hand, has a second camera that has 2x optical zoom. In other words, any image taken with the second camera is magnified by 2x. Thus, theoretically, if we use a camera with optical zoom to take pictures of our samples through the foldscope, we should achieve much higher magnifications. Note that magnification is multiplicative as it passes through multiple lenses, so the 400x taken with a 2x camera should result in an 800x magnification. Unfortunately, I don’t have access to such a camera at the moment, and thus haven’t been able to test my theory. However, I don’t see any major problems with my theory and highly suspect it to be the case. If anyone has access to any camera with optical zoom, please test my theory! (It is also entirely possible that this was already known, tested, and used.)


 Another idea I had for modifications to the foldscope was to make it a fluorescence microscope. I am currently an undergraduate student at UCLA pursuing a degree in molecular biology. As such, fluorescence microscope are a key aspect of my work. Now, I understand that, for the most part, fluorescence microscopy isn’t really an important or useful aspect of microscopy for many people. Even for molecular biologists, they don’t really need flourescence viewing abilities in the foldscope because they will have access to it in their labs. For me however, the ability to modify the foldscope to view flourescent samples would be a great addition to my field research. It would also make it a much stronger educational tool, and could be especially more useful for medical diagnosics (staining with flourescent dye attached antibodies, for example).


 The way to do this seems simple enough in theory. The light source must either be filtered, or changed so that it only emits a small range of light wavelengths. For example, a UV filter or a UV LED can be used to make sure the only light going into the sample is UV. Then, in front of the lens, we just need another filter that completely blocks the UV light and lets other wavelengths of light through. Or, more specifically, this filter must let the light fluoresced off the sample through (for this example, say the sample is GFP and thus emits green light), and completely block the UV light so that it cannot be detected by the observer/camera.


 I am a lot less sure of this second idea. It relies entirely on whether or not the filter is good enough to completely block the undesired light. I haven’t had the time to test this one yet, but I do plan to do so soon. If anyone has suggestions, questions, or would like to go on and test my idea themselves, feel free to let me know and do so!

Bilguudei Naranbaatar

Earth

Posts

The Nomadic Scientist

Saving the Ganga Lake

Possible Applications, Modifications, Improvements

Locations

Statistics

Type of Sample

Foldscope Lens Magnification