It is the little things in life

You may have heard of the Foldscope, a portable microscope which is simple to make, cheap to provide and which aims to unleash the curious in people. Well,...

Recently a Kickstarter campaign to raise money for the project raised its target of $50,000 through crowdfunding in a matter of hours, and the total continues to grow. The inventors of the microscope want to send a million of the items out to schools and communities across the world next year, bringing the technology to a whole new audience in an affordable and usable way. . 

In the interests of that aforementioned curiosity, we did some reading and discovered something that we did not know before. Following a link, we discovered that not only is the microscope being used for textile archaeology now but that the first person to explore microscopic life, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, was a draper and used magnifying glasses to look at textiles, just as we do today. Being naturally inquisitive led him to train his magnifiers on the small life that surrounds us, making him the father of microbiology. Isn't that a great fact to drop into a conversation this festive season...