#BioE301C

We took a hair follicle and were able to observe the root, its dermal papilla, as well as the cuticle of the hair shaft. This hair follicle is average in thickness. Usually, a hair thicknesss between 0.06 and 0.08 mm is considered to be average while a diameter between 0.08 mm and 0.1 mm is considered to be thick. This hair follicle comes from Kasra, one of our team members who is not losing hair. By contrast, Peter (another team member) has much thinner hair and would likely not be detectable at this microscope resolution. However, we did not test this hypothesis because Peter is too self conscious about his thinning hair.

Calculation of Scale Bar

The Foldscope was calibrated with a size scale in a manner similar to that described by our wonderful teaching assistant, Xinzhi Zou, in her Foldscope #BioE301C post from last year. In this approach, we draw two lines with a 1mm distance between them using a ruler. We take a picture of these two lines using the phone camera attached to the Foldscope. Finally, we appended a line going between these two lines at one-tenth of the length of the 1mm line, giving us a 100 micron scale bar.

Marija Pavlovic (marijavp), Peter Washington (peter100), Kasra Naftchi-Ardebili (knaftchi)