Microscope Workshop

George and team from Darigov Research provided an excellent introduction to the open source, microscopes and then step by step guidance on how to build the FoldScope microscope.

We actually had a few more people that this turn up after we took this photo:

The first item on the menu for microscopic inspection were some Sweet & Salty Crystals™ 😉 which we’d grown in the lab over the last few days. The sugar may have provided a nucleation point that the salt then crystalised around, whatever the reason they had these interesting crosses through them (not very obvious in the photo below):

Up close you can see they have a strange cross shaped indentation

We moved on to look at some of our hairs, and skin detritus from ears. We also found our algae in a bottle look much more magical up close (collected from Cambridge)

And finally took a closer look at our Daphnia (collected from near Highbury and Islington, London). There was a Rotifer moving around too but we couldn’t find it after a while… probably ended up as afternoon tea for the Daphnia!

To compare and contrast with our lab microscope we took some more pictures. These were on a different phone and we managed to get them into focus more easily so it’s not like for like comparison… the images you can see through the foldscope are actually better than those above but we didn’t take time to fine tune the setup. Included below are also some stained cheek cells from last week.

Thanks to everyone who attended!