Leeuwenhoek is drooling in his grave

Ooh, ick, I guess that's a really disgusting zombie image. But anyway, look at this: a cheap and easy DIY photomicrography setup.

Back in the day, I once built a homely kludge consisting of our very expensive microscope, a nice 35mm SLR, and a bit of cardboard and duct tape to hold it exactly the right distance from the eyepieces that did sort of the same thing. And then we had a lab in cell biology at the start of the semester in which students looked at a variety of cell types and were asked to draw them…and all over the room students were just whipping out their cell phones, aiming them down the eyepieces, and taking photos instead.

Maybe we're getting to the point where we can save the department a whole lot of money on those low-end student scopes and instead build a bunch of these little frames and ask our students to bring their cell phones to lab.