Ideas change everything

Lifesaving scientific tools made of paper

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Manu Prakash |

TED2017

• April 2017

Inventor Manu Prakash turns everyday materials into powerful scientific devices, from paper microscopes to a clever new mosquito tracker. From the TED Fellows stage, he demos Paperfuge, a hand-powered centrifuge inspired by a spinning toy that costs 20 cents to make and can do the work of a $1,000 machine, no electricity required.

Want to use TED Talks in your organization?

Want to use TED Talks in your organization?

Inventor Manu Prakash turns everyday materials into powerful scientific devices, from paper microscopes to a clever new mosquito tracker. From the TED Fellows stage, he demos Paperfuge, a hand-powered centrifuge inspired by a spinning toy that costs 20 cents to make and can do the work of a $1,000 machine, no electricity required.

Want to use TED Talks in your organization?

This talk was presented at an official TED conference.

Read our curation guidelines.

Learn more about Abuzz, a citizen-based mosquito monitoring system.

Experience the curiosity and excitement of scientific exploration with Foldscope, an ultra-low cost microscope made from common materials.

About the speaker

Physicist, inventor

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TED Fellow Manu Prakash is on a mission to bring radical new technology to global health.

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"Using mobile phones as acoustic sensors for high-throughput mosquito surveillance"

Manu Prakash and his colleagues demonstrate that commercially available mobile phones are a powerful tool for acoustically mapping mosquito species distributions worldwide.

This talk was presented at an official TED conference.

Read our curation guidelines.

Learn more about Abuzz, a citizen-based mosquito monitoring system.

Experience the curiosity and excitement of scientific exploration with Foldscope, an ultra-low cost microscope made from common materials.