Awesome Microscopes

This tiny accessory turns your phone’s camera into a powerful microscope. It offers magnification from 100x to 800x with a 1-micron resolution. It’s designed for use with flat transparent objects and sample slides and comes with a stand and reflective box with a polarizer that helps ensure subjects are in focus and well lit.

This set of modular blocks snaps onto your smartphone or tablet camera and turns it into a microscope. The kit includes a backlight, 60X, 150X, and 300X magnifiers, and a slide holder that can also hold liquid specimens. In addition, pre-packaged slides display information about the specimens using augmented reality tech.

YouTube science channel Journey to the Microcosmos showcases astounding close-up images of the tiniest organisms on Earth. In this video, Hank Green looks back at their first four seasons, and celebrates with a set of new tools for Master of Microscopes James Weiss.

Smart MicroOptics‘ tabletop gadget is designed to turn any smartphone into a high resolution microscope. The system will offer 35x-200x, 75x-500x, and 150x-1000x magnification modules, capturing details as small as 0.7 micron. Both a basic and precision sample stage are available.

The Foldscope is an incredibly affordable flat-pack microscope that’s mostly made of paper. It comes with a lens that provides 140x magnification – on par with four-figure microscopes. The $20 kit comes with prepared and blank slides, an LED lamp and more.

Will and Robbie from At-Bristol show off a neat trick for science geeks. When you project a laser pointer through a droplet of water, it creates a microscope that can project tiny organisms onto your wall. (Thanks Ross!)

This gadget works with most smartphones to turn them into a portable microscope, capturing still or video images of tiny organisms or other objects. It provides up to 800x magnification and requires no slides or other supplies.

Everyday objects can become a lot more interesting when observed at the microscopic level. Why not give this project by kmyoshino a try and turn your smartphone into a digital microscope with materials costing just $10.