Cool Thing Of The Day: UCLA Researcher Develops $10 Cellphone Microscope

Even with all the hype about the US losing our edge in the innovation race, our flagship universities still turn out the most mind-blowing inventions. Case in point: the new Cellphone Microscope, whose workings are described in the nanotech journal Lab On A Chip:"...this lensfree imaging platform can be mechanically attached to the camera unit of a cellphone where the samples are loaded from the side, and are vertically illuminated by a simple light-emitting diode (LED). This incoherent LED light is then scattered from each micro-object to coherently interfere with the background light, creating the lensfree hologram of each object on the detector array of the cellphone. These holographic signatures captured by the cellphone permit reconstruction of microscopic images of the objects through rapid digital processing."