Manu Prakesh, a professor of bioengineering at Stanford University (US), was searching for a practical alternative to his team’s expensive electron microscope. It was very bulky, hard to transport and using it required a lot of training. They say that “necessity is the mother of invention”, and this worked for Manu. He invented the “foldscope” which is made out of paper, costs only two euros, and yet has a zoom of 140 times - strong enough to see a malaria parasite inside of a cell.