Tag Archives: microorganisms
The uHandy Duet lets your smartphone’s fancy camera click microscopic shots too
Telephoto, wide, and now ultra-wide… your phone has all these incredible lenses that let you shoot farther, or fit more into a frame, but uHandy lets your phone manage the opposite, and remarkably so! The uHandy Duet isn’t a macro lens… it’s a literal mobile-mounted microscope. You can zoom in on bugs, microorganism, even cells, to experience life on a scale that’s too small for the eye to see. Duet’s microscopes (there are two of them) attach to your phone, and use small sample-gathering stickers to collect everything you can find, be it hair, pollen, dust, or anything else you want to dive deep into.
A lower-intensity Lo-Mag lens allows you to observe small details like textures, or a butterfly’s wings, while the more powerful Hi-Mag lens lets you zoom in as much as 30x~200x to be able to view things or microorganisms as small as 1 micrometer (imagine being able to look at a small cluster of the transistors on the new iPhone’s chip!) The Hi-Mag lens uses its own light-source, and is roughly the size of a hockey-puck, giving you the ability to view literally an entire new world with your smartphone! The uHandy seems like a perfect toy to get kids curious about the micro-world around them, but truth be told, I’m probably just as eager to own one of these!
Designer: uHandy
Creating electricity from a bog in a bomb crater
Microorganisms Play in a Pac-Man Maze: Protozoan-Man
Scientists at the University of Southeast Norway apparently have nothing better to do, so they released microorganisms into a Pac-Man-style maze made out of fluid to observe how the single-celled euglena (Pac-Men) avoid their predators, the multi-celled rotifers (Ghosts). I love how scientists will use any excuse to get their geek on.
These “micromazes” make it easier to view and study microorganisms, which can normally be found bunched together in a Petri dish. Now they are spread out and you can see what’s going on better.
So why the tiny Pac-Man imitation? Well, that is maybe the most brilliant part of all of this. It is a good way for the researchers to better communicate their findings to the public. It certainly got our attention. Next I want to see Dig-Dug.
[Motherboard via Gizmodo]