08:39 – My beta copy of the Foldscope showed up yesterday. These $1 microscopes are not toys; far from it. They’re intended for educational use and also for diagnostic use in the field. They come in several variants, including brightfield, darkfield, and polarizing, and in different fixed magnifications up to 1,200X.
The Foldscope beta project distributed 10,000 of these microscopes, including one to me. Their initial goal is to get a bunch of these into people’s hands and assemble documentation from contributed articles about various aspects of using the scopes. I plan to contribute a section or two myself anonymously and in the public domain. Once the scopes are available for sale commercially, we’ll probably start including one in every biology kit we ship. Maybe every kit, period.
I’m making up chemicals for chemistry and biology kits today, and may have time to get started on bottling them as well.