Microcosmos

Head of a Stick ant from the Ecuadorian amazon

minxfuller — Fri, 14 Jul 2017 10:55:22 +0000

We are at Sani Lodge just north of the Napo River. This is flooded forest in the Amazon.
I collected this ant from the underside of a large leaf of a tree that held the ant nest. The tiny ants were trying to build new nests under the leaf Sheltered from the rain #stine17

curiosity to see cheek cells

Swapna_Agastya — Tue, 11 Jul 2017 06:26:42 +0000

My name is N. Arun from ZPHS Daseganuru 9th class. when iam listening animal cell class i was interested to see cheek cell. I was first confused how can we see cheek cell through foldscope. After using foldscope i wondered and amazing that i observed the cell wall ,cytoplasm and nucleus , nucleus which is presented at the centre.

Foldscoping from a boat – hello from NZ

Manu Prakash — Sat, 08 Jul 2017 02:40:09 +0000

I just started a collaboration with Plankton Planet; bringing microscopy on sail boats around the world. An incredible world of plankton – in every drop of the ocean. I will write more about this new work soon; but here is a few snapshots of what it felt like.

To get access to the plankton, you take a Plankton net at 2-3 knot speed and pull the net behind the boat for 15min. This is a quick little trick to get millions of plankton which can be imaged for a long time.

And here is a quick look at the incredible plankton we caught in our nets.

I will be writing individual posts on all the specific diatoms, copepods, dinoflagellate.. that were in our nets – but wanted to share this quickly with foldscope community. As you ID anything you see here; please post a comment below.

Cheers

Manu

Our Latex experiments

laksiyer — Tue, 04 Jul 2017 21:59:55 +0000

We wondered what the white latex of a Ficus plant would look like under a Foldscope. Here is the experiment in 5 short videos

Video 1/5: Latex in Ficus elongatus.

Video 2/5. We spread the latex onto the slide. We had two slides, one in which we really stirred the latex and the other we just dropped the latex.

Video 3/5 Latex under the Foldscope with the LED light source.

Video 4/5 Latex under the Foldscope with a Table lamp as the light source.

Video 5/5 What might happen if we drop some Latex on an ant?

About 14% of tropical plants secrete latex. From sealing breaks in leaves and defending plants from insects and herbivores, to making rubber tires and chewing gum, Latex is an integral part of our modern lives. What might those particles be made of? Could we compare this across different plant species using a Foldscope.

Happy 4th for those in the US.

Aditi and Laks

-DC Micronauts

This post is open to read and review on The Winnower.

First grains of sand

lombardfa — Tue, 04 Jul 2017 12:20:31 +0000

Black sand from a beach north of Auckland (volcanic green grain certainly olivine + “the cigar” certainly a spicule from urchin

Fast moving creatures in the water collected in a Bromeliad in the cloud forest

minxfuller — Mon, 03 Jul 2017 05:09:33 +0000

I collected water from down between the leaves in a bromiliad in the cloud forest at Santa Lucia Bioreserve on the western slope of the Andes in Ecuador. These Long thin creatures were zipping around. anyone know what they are? #stine17

It’s on!

iyerbiswas — Sat, 01 Jul 2017 22:33:25 +0000

Petal and leaf from the backyard.

Microscope in an envelope, so many possibilities!

iyerbiswas — Fri, 30 Jun 2017 00:58:37 +0000

Testing Foldscope on pond scum, soil, onion, fish tank scum, and Morchella elata

ianhull — Sun, 25 Jun 2017 23:35:21 +0000

We are a Stanford class, led by Prof. Margaret “Minx” Fuller, that is about to embark on a trip to Ecuador to study evolution in the Amazon rainforest and Andean cloud forest. We are very excited for the opportunity to use the Foldscope throughout the trip to look at whatever organisms we can find in bromeliads, lakes, rivers, soil – anything we can fit on a slide! Prof. Prakash met us at Bio-X Kids’ Day to teach us how to build and use the Foldscope.

The first sample we looked at through the Foldscope was some pond scum that Manu brought from Russia:We could see some fungal hyphae protruding from a blade of the pond scum.

We also grabbed some soil from below a nearby plant:The soil had a lot of shards of inorganic material in it, but we also saw what looked like plenty of organic material. We think we saw some fungal spores, such as the very round, dark object near the center of this image:

Later, I looked at an onion leaf and stem through the scope:Onion leafOnion stem

My lab mentor had a fish tank in her apartment with some algal growth that I examined:Zooming in as much as possible on the iPhone camera seemed to reveal that the cells are segmented and chained to form one “blade” of this algae.

Finally, we looked at some Morchella elata mycelium, the base for the prized culinary morel mushrooms:MyceliumWe’re not sure what these small, oval-shaped objects are, but there were a lot of them! Does anyone have an idea what they might be? I’m not sure if it’s just inorganic substrate, or something more interesting.

Many thanks to Manu Prakash for gifting us these Foldscopes! We hope to provide more posts soon, next time from Ecuador!

– Ian and the rest of the Stanford in Ecuador overseas seminar

Sand crab

kirsten_thompson — Sun, 25 Jun 2017 22:17:20 +0000

Test image of a sad crab slide made by a student at Intel ISEF outreach day!