#frugalscience

This guy makes “foldscopes” that you can use anywhere to look at microbes without all that fussy expensive equipment. Great!

Some people are a little skeptical about this actually having an impact on science in the developing world. “So you can see the parasites in your blood,” they scoff. “So what?” It’s part of a larger discussion about really hype non-profits like One Laptop Per Child that get all excited about science and technology available to everyone, but then it ends up not being that useful (case in point: it turns out that for most children, having a laptop introduced into their learning curriculum doesn’t really change their skills – but I can GUARANTEE it makes them better at writing silly blogs about magazines). Some people are even worried that if kids don’t see any germs with their foldscopes, they’ll mistakenly think something is squeaky clean, when in fact it’s just that the ‘scope can only view things over 2 microns large.

OK, fine, but isn’t it still really cool to have a cheap microscope so you can look at stuff?