After Manu’s kind gift from the neglected tropical disease Gordon Conference in March, this week my 8 year old son put together the foldscope on his own with a mission. In North Carolina at this time of year it is pine pollen season. Everywhere is dusted with a fine yellow powder. This is obviously a bit messy and for those with allergies it’s uncomfortable. My son’s goal was to see what this pollen looked like.

He simply took some tape and stuck it to our passenger wing mirror of the car, peeled it off and placed it on a glass slide. Initially we viewed under the foldscope then attached it to my iphone.

It did not take long until he found lots of little “hamburger” shaped pollen grains. His response was “hey dad they look like butts”.

Another future scientist/engineer has just seen one tiny aspect of the world in a whole new way.. we then moved on to skin cells…