On this first day of meteorological winter, I noticed the moribund flora around my campus and decided for my lab assignment to use a Foldscope to find what's changed about the grass as the surface grass dies for the winter. There are a few obvious signs of this, but the most salient is, of course, the change of the color of the grass from green to a pale tan-brown. Similarly, the grass also becomes weaker, it loses some of its tensile strength and becomes more translucent. For this collection, I found one live and one dying blade of grass on Poe Field, on the south side of Princeton University's campus. It is a sunny day, but chilly and breezy; the sort of day that makes everyone want to huddle inside or rush to their next destination. But the grass has nowhere to go.

This is a picture of a dead grass blade, as seen through the Foldscope. There is some level of debris around the blade, but the nature of the grass blade as a series of lines of walled cells is somewhat visible. I also tried to photograph a live blade of grass, but unfortunately, it seems to be too opaque to see sufficiently the structure of the blade. The debris and blurriness of the scope may also contribute to this weakness. My best photo is to the side.
In all, I feel that these Foldscopes are a promising technology, particularly if the folding process can be streamlined and simplified a bit, and if advice on collecting samples could be more readily provided. This is certainly a massive breakthrough for citizen science, so despite the drabness and death of the season, I feel that there is a renaissance of science to counteract it, waiting just ahead of us. How can this improve citizen science? Where can it be used? And, more to this topic, how well will this particular grass plant recover in the spring?

I conducted this project as part of
Professor Pringle’s EEB321 class at Princeton University