Foldscopes

Coinvented by Stanford university's PhD student Jim Cybulski and Professor Manu Prakash, Foldscope © is the world's first-ever portable, patent-protected paper microscope. Traditional microscopes are bulky, pricey, and easy to break. To make science more accessible, this pair has experimented with numerous low-cost materials to create affordable lab equipments. The result is a revolutionary microscope made from just magnets, lens, and papers with a manufacturing cost of less than $1. Don't judge a book by its cover. Being highly portable and comes with a respected x140 magnification, this sturdy piece of equipment is more than just a classroom teaching tool; it is also used by research scientists working in the field. As of today, Foldscope has reached over 1 million people worldwide.

Specification: Simple light microscope, standard magnification 140x

Viewable objects:

Biological samples: from smaller beings such as bacteria, blood cells, and single-celled organisms like copepods, tardigrades, tetrahymena, diatoms, rotifers, nematodes to larger things like insects & body tissues
Non-biological samples: particulates detrimental to air quality, or the microscopic crystalline differences between real and fake medications

To make a purchase, kindly use this referral link.

Foldscope

From $6.00

Kindly use this referral link.
As you might have already knew, Natural History Unfolds (NHU) is completely free for anyone to use. To keep our site going, we have also partnered up with some organizations to promote their products. Parts of our partner's sales profit will be commissioned to NHU, which would in turn help to alleviate some of the site's running costs. By making a purchase through these referral links, you are essentially helping NHU out.

Note: Commission-based referral sales is sometimes offered to us by our partners. Most of the time, we assist our partners advertise their products for free to support their cause. If you would like to support us instead, you could consider donating directly via links located in the donation page.
While each Foldscope takes less than $1 to make, there are still costs associated to logistics (including local and international distribution), marketing, human labor, adminstration, and a reasonable profit margin for Foldscope Instruments to grow as a company. Despite so, Foldscope still manages to keep its selling cost under $10 (cheaper without the add-ons), making it one of the most affordable portable microscopes in the market.