#HTE

Reader Submitted: Public Lab’s Community Microscope Kit Invites Everybody to Rethink the Traditional Microscope

The Community Microscope is a Do-It-Yourself kit that is not only a radically affordable microscope, but one which you build yourself from simple household parts. Like all Public Lab kits, it was designed through collaboration among our global community.

Now we’ve launched a Kickstarter to recruit new collaborators.

Its true goal, however, is to transform the very idea of a microscope by challenging who can make one, and what it can be used for. By making it so simple to build, we’re inviting people to remix and reinvent the microscope, and to turn it towards urgent issues like air pollution from sand mines, ocean microplastics, and more—questions which come from local environmental groups across the globe.

Like all Public Lab kits, it is open source, and hundreds of people have already joined our effort to change how environmental science works—by changing who can participate.