The Stanford biology professor behind the 60p paper microscope, and the 16p medical centrifuge, is now taking on malaria – and he wants to use your phone’s microphone.
Manu Prakash, whose “frugal science” team has shipped 50,000 [link URL="https://www.wired.co.uk/article/macroscope"]Foldscope[/link] microscopes to 130 countries in the past two years, has now launched Abuzz – a crowdsourced surveillance project for tracking and identifying disease-carrying mosquitos in real time. Because different species of mosquito have different wing-beats, Prakash’s team at Stanford is collecting those wing-beats’ sound frequencies to identify the location of up to 30 species of mosquito that carry human pathogens. He’s asking citizen scientists to upload audio recordings of mosquito buzzes, which he says can be captured on cheap feature-phone microphones as well as smartphones. Software then identifies the frequencies and locations of mosquitos that carry diseases.
“Now anyone in the world with a $10 flip-phone can contribute in building real-time mosquito maps by identifying mosquitoes species based on how they ‘buzz’ and thus contribute to the world wide effort for eliminating mosquito borne diseases,” Prakash said at the TED conference in Vancouver this week. “Pull out your cellphones and fight the deadliest animal in the world."
Prakash also demonstrated a 16p counter-rotating centrifuge intended to replace the $1,000 conventional centrifuge used by labs to analyse liquids such as human blood.
His team’s new invention, PaperFuge, can separate blood samples at up to 125,000 revolutions per minute, equivalent to 30,000 g-forces. And unlike conventional, expensive centrifuges, it’s neither bulky nor dependent on electricity, which is often unavailable in rural clinics. Its secret? The science of the spinning “whirligig” toy you played with as a child.
“On a 2013 field trip to Uganda, in a remote clinic, I saw a centrifuge used as a door stop – because the clinic had no electricity,” Prakash told the TED conference. “So we started thinking about solving this problem.
“I started with yo-yos. I wondered if I could use the physics of yo-yos to make a centrifuge.”
That led Prakash, a TED senior fellow, to the whirligig, a toy made from two strings and a disc that spins. “It’s the oldest toy known to man. We wrote some maths equations, and ten pages later we could work it out.” Read more: A 60p microscope is helping diagnose diseases and save lives
In a live demonstration, he pricked his finger, took a small amount of blood, and drew it into a capillary tube which he sealed with clay and mounted on a paper-and-string whirligig-type device. With the capillary tube sealed and attached, he spun the PaperFuge in his hands for 30 seconds until the blood cells had been visibly separated from the plasma. The sample can then be used to diagnose conditions such as malaria.
“You can use it for diagnosis in the field,” he said. “It costs 20 cents [16p].”
He said his team plans to ship a million Foldscope devices this year, “at no local cost”.
“We’re going to make science accessible not just to the people who can afford it, but to the billions who can’t.
“I’ve been thinking broadly about access to science around the world,” Prakash said. “How do you bring the ‘tools of curiosity’ widely available to every kid on the planet? What does it mean to share the joy of discovery more broadly and inspire the next generation of scientists by not just telling them about science, but engaging them directly in the process of science?”
The TED conference continues until today.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
