It’s reaching the point where there isn’t anything that can’t be printed these days. Most people have heard about guns, houses, ceramics, etc., but today I learned about printing microscopes.
From paper:
A new microscope can be printed on a flat piece of paper and assembled with a few extra components in less than 10 minutes. All the parts to make it cost less than a dollar, according to Stanford bioengineer Manu Prakash and colleagues, who describe their origami optics this week in a paper published on arxiv.org.
The goal, as Prakash explains in a TED talk posted today, is to provide a cheap medical screening tool that could be widely used in the developing world. Because the microscopes can be printed by the thousands, they could also be used for education and field research.
All you need beyond the printed paper parts is a simple lens, an LED, and a tiny button battery.
Amazing. But seeing is believing.