The Foldscope site
http://www.foldscope.com/ says the sign-up for the first round of beta testers is closed. How can the general public make or buy a Foldscope?
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/22/science/science-tools-anyone-can-afford.htmlScience Tools Anyone Can Afford
By JOHN MARKOFF
New York Times
APRIL 21, 2014
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Dr. Prakash, 34, a biophysicist and an assistant professor at Stanford University, is designing laboratory tools that are significantly cheaper and in some cases more powerful than existing professional equipment.
Last month he received widespread attention for his Foldscope, a 3D-printed microscope assembled from origami-folded paper. The microscope will make it possible for schoolchildren, laboratory technicians and even the world’s best scientists to have the imaging power of a desktop instrument worth several thousand dollars at the cost of less than a dollar.
He said he hopes to put paper microscopes in the hands of every child in the developing world, providing them with the ability to see for themselves such things as whether their drinking water is clean.
“I want to explore what happens to society when microscopes are a common day-to-day term,” he said recently in an interview in his laboratory at the James H. Clark Center at Stanford. The microscope is part of Dr. Prakash’s larger vision of providing “science laboratories for the rest of us.” And that goal was further advanced earlier this month when he and a graduate student, George Korir, were awarded the $50,000 first prize in the Moore Foundation Science Play and Research Kit Competition, a challenge to reimagine the ubiquitous chemistry set of an earlier era that could capture the imagination of a new generation of young scientists.
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The potential for these kinds of tools became evident after the Moore Foundation, established by Gordon Moore, a pioneering semiconductor engineer who was a founder of Intel, announced that it had awarded Dr. Prakash’s laboratory $757,000 to manufacture 10,000 Foldscopes, to be distributed to people who submit a question they would like to use the instrument to help answer. In the two weeks after the March 11 announcement, more than 8,000 applications had been received.
