Vrinda Suresh

Thanks to the winter rains the past few days/a few weeks ago, we’re finally getting lush greenery around campus. So I decided to collect some moss growing near Lake Lag to examine with my foldscope.


 The moss didn’t require too much preparation, since it is pretty thin/translucent even when intact. I took a small bit (one stem, basically) of the moss and placed it on the slide, and added a drop of water before placing the cover slide on top.

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 I was actually able to see incredibly fine lines on the leaves. According to the internet, moss leaves are a single cell-layer thick, so I’m thinking I might have been seeing the cell walls?


 There are lots of lichens and other tiny plants/fungi growing in this wet weather, so it’ll be interesting to see what else I can find and collect for foldscoping!

[Bio60_2019] &#8211; Moss

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 I was eating an orange before class on Thursday, so decided to look at a bit of orange peel using my foldscope. You can really see the texture of the peel under the lens, with different layers and different thicknesses of the peel in different places. As I was trying to focus the image, it would focus on different layers of the peel as the lens moved towards and away from the specimen, which was cool. I was a bit disappointed that I couldn’t really make out any cells, though.


 To prepare the slide, I tore off a thin layer of the peel (just a bit of the orange part, tried to avoid the thicker white stuff) and put it on a slide with a coverslip over it. The peel itself was a kind of wet from being handled and torn up, so I did not add water when preparing the slide, but maybe adding water would have changed how it looked.

Vrinda Suresh

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[Bio60_2019] – Moss

Orange Peel – Bio60_2019

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Foldscope Lens Magnification