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LEGO microscope ‘lowers the barrier’ into the microscopic world

Physics World August 2021

Physics World

 
News & Analysis Physics World  August 2021

LEGO microscope ‘lowers the barrier’ into the microscopic world

Brick by brick The LEGO microscope (left) and a technical drawing of the instrument. The black eyepiece is at the top, and also visible is the black wheel that is used to adjust the position of the objective lens. (Courtesy: Timo Betz)

A fully functional modular microscope has been built using LEGO bricks and low-cost smartphone lenses. Designed by researchers, teachers and schoolchildren in Germany, the instrument is easy to build, yet it can resolve micron-sized objects such as individual living cells (The Biophysicist 10.35459/tbp.2021.000191). 

The idea for a LEGO microscope came to biophysicist Timo Betz from the universities of Göttingen and Münster while playing with LEGO with his son. With help from Betz’s colleague, Bart Vos, the trio then spent a year fine-tuning the design, writing construction plans and validating the instrument’s usefulness. The final design resembles a simple LEGO tower with the only non-LEGO parts being the microscope’s lenses. For high magnification, the design uses a lens from a low-cost replacement iPhone 5 camera module, which is attached to a LEGO brick with transparent tape and a glass coverslip. Using these plastic iPhone lenses, the microscope can achieve 254 times magnification.

The creators hope that the microscope can be built and used in classrooms and homes to learn about optics. To further this aim, they have written instructions and a step-by-step tutorial to guide people through construction while learning about the relevant optical characteristics of a microscope. 

Moreover, they enlisted eight 9–13-year-olds from a local Münster school who built the microscope themselves and conducted several experiments. These included watching crystallization in real-time as water evaporates from a thin film of salt solution; recording pigmentation changes to red onion epidermal cells exposed to an osmotic shock; and observing the movement of tiny swimming organisms such as Artemia shrimp and water fleas.

This is not the first time a microscope has been made of LEGO. In 2013 a group of postgraduate students at the University of California, San Francisco designed a similar microscope called LegoScope. However, it required a custom objective lens and 3D-printed parts. 

Betz argues that the new LEGO microscope’s readily available and reusable parts “lower the barrier, especially for parents”, making it perfect for demonstrating the principles of microscopy. “It was a lot of fun to develop this,” he says. “I just hope that children and their parents have a chance to realize that even with simple tools, one can do amazing things.”

Ben Skuse