Hannah Yi, for Quartz:
Foldscope is an origami microscope made with a single sheet of paper that’s embedded with electronics and lenses. It costs less than $1 to build. Manu Prakash is the inventor of this low-cost scientific tool. He wants microscopes to be as ubiquitous as pencils and plans on shipping one million Foldscopes by the end of 2017.
Prakash is a 2016 MacArthur follow, winning $625k to continue his ‘frugal science’ work.