If you thought that the mobile phone was only for making calls, texting, having fun, listening to music and connecting with the rest of the world, then a brand new and very special add-on app might change all of that very soon. Aydogan Ozcan, an assistant professor of electrical engineering and member of the California NanoSystems Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, has managed to turn a mobile into a ‘mobile microscope’ that allows you to instantly magnify and view any sample at hand. So what is so great about adding a microscope to a mobile you ask?

For starters, it has no additional mechanical parts, meaning no extra lenses and hence no real additional weight. It is done using software that Ozcan himself wrote and a few additional parts that actually cost nothing more than $10! The fact that this mobile microscope needs no mechanical scanning makes it a wonderful aid to medical practitioners who need to check for disease carrying pathogens in blood when on the go. So, instead of sending samples back to lab and waiting for reports, now digital imaging will give the results instantly and conveniently.

So just capture the hologram of the cells onto your mobile, scan it and get the desired results… Now that is the kind of technology that future episodes of CSI could use!

nytimes