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Turn your iPhone into a microscope with a drop of water

iPhone photo
Alex Wild

Before we get too far into this blog post, let's review one very important safety warning: It is generally a really bad idea to pour water onto your electronics. A really, really bad idea.

Understood?

Great. Now let me tell about how you can turn your iPhone into a microscope by dripping water onto it.

Scientific American's Alex Wild came up with the idea after reading about some techniques studied by a team at UC Davis. According to him, all you have to do is place a drop of water onto your iPhone's camera lens, carefully turn it over and watch the droplet serve as a liquid lens:

"Droplet images are dreamy, blurred at the periphery, and just a little bit … wet," he writes. "But the tiny subjects underneath are magnified with sufficient resolution for an impromptu microscope."

As you can see by the image above or by checking out his blog post, Wild's trick's not all that bad. It's not exactly going to make anyone turn away from third-party iPhone accessories which can produce the same effect without risking water-damage — but it works.

Want more tech news, silly puns, or amusing links? You'll get plenty of all three if you keep up with Rosa Golijan, the writer of this post, by following her on Twitter , subscribing to her Facebook posts , or circling her on Google+ .