Education

ByB Concludes Ivy League Visits, Celebrates Cricket Cigarettes

ByB is back in Ann Arbor after a 1600 mile road trip to Boston and Ithaca to visit Harvard and Cornell. Our guest lecture for Professor Murthy’s neuroscience course went very well; in a first for ByB, the cigarette gatorade cricket ganglion experiment definitively worked! Too bad we weren’t recording the data. Tim put a cricket on wax underneath a microscope, exposed the ganglion, positioned the ganglionizer micromanipulator prototype into position, hooked the bipolar electrodes to the SpikerBox, and heard evoked spikes (from blowing on the Cerci)!!!

Then, Greg took a cigarette (Natural Sherman Unfiltered), put it in a bottle of gatorade, shook it up, and Tim then aliquoted this potent mixture onto the exposed ganglia. And to the delight of everyone in the class, the ganglion neurons increased their firing rate and we even heard some neurons dying (baaaarrrrrraaaaaaaaa…you all know what it sounds like)!Nicotine affects Acetylcholine receptors? Who knew?

Some photos from our trip:

Going to Sever HallMarzullo, Murthey, Gagethe StudentsThe Lecture

We also visitedMichael Fee‘s lab at MIT, on the way teaching folks on the subway about neurons:

kdk_0518

On the way back to Ann Arbor, Tim stopped by Cornell to visit the pioneers of inexpensive Neurophysiology: The CRAWDAD group. Tim felt at home in the beautiful campus and Mudd Hall, where the magic happens and neurobiology is king.

Gorge

Mudd Hall

Tim also met local neuroelectronics guru Bruce Land, who offered some helpful tips on amplifiers. “Remember what you did 10 years ago? We are trying to do the same thing.” He gave us his best wishes.

Land endorse