The Backyard Brains 2018 Summer Research Fellowship is coming to a close, but not before we get some real-world scientific experience in! Our research fellows are nearing the end of their residency at the Backyard Brains lab, and they are about to begin their tenure as neuroscience advocates and Backyard Brains ambassadors. The fellows dropped in […]

To foraging and bee-yond: where the bee project is headed next I can hardly believe it’s time for my last blog post, I still have so many bee puns I haven’t taken advantage of yet! Since my last post, I’ve found that working with bees can be far more dependent on environmental conditions, like amounts of […]

As I was doing this project, the specter waiting for me as we started wrapping up our projects was the prospect of having to answer the question, “So what?” What is the point of this research? I spent most of my time working on the “methods,” the techniques (surgeries, soldering, coding) that became the experimental […]

Hello friends, this is Yifan again. As the end of the summer draws near, my summer research is also coming to a conclusion. The work I did over the summer was very different from what I expected. Since this is a wrap up post for an ongoing project, let us first go through what exactly […]

Though it feels like just last week I landed here in Michigan, it seems that it’s almost the time for me to go back home. Though my work with the project here is wrapping up, there’s still so much to be done, but I’m confident that I’m leaving behind a good framework. These past few weeks […]

Strange to be introducing a new project on my conclusion post, but it’s a cool one! While waiting for pea plant project parts to arrive, I revisited another project that Monica Gagliano had done with the Mimosa pudica: https://youtu.be/Xm5i53eiMkU?t=2m45s. For those of you too impatient to watch a video (like me!) the Mimosa pudica is a […]

After spending 24+ hours in a hot closet with strangers, I’ve learned a couple things. Walk with me (like lovers do) So far, I have recorded from a lot of people with a large range of experience levels in search for a biomarker for meditation- e.g. something more reliable than a person just “saying so” when […]

Hello, everyone! Welcome back to the last installment of silkmoth updates. Things are starting to wrap up here this summer, and I’ve begun to analyze the data I have been collecting. Behavioral Data Analysis Last post, I explained the behavior assay that I am using with the moths to demonstrate how the sex pheromone bombykol can alter […]

Hello everyone! The previous two weeks have been an emotional and professional roller-coaster for me. It was tough saying goodbye to Etienne, who was such a lovely mentor for almost five weeks, but there was also the joy of welcoming Stanislav (our new mentor!), my parents from India visited me and then they left, I […]

Welcome back, fellow Jelly-Lovers! We’ve got lots of exciting jellyfish-based updates below, including revealing videos of our very own clytia hemisphaerica, screenshots from and updates about the tracking software, and information on our new recording chamber. (And, of course, I have photos of the full jellyfish costume from the 4th of July!) Jelly Videos: As promised, we […]

Be it fate, choice, or a downstream effect of our universe’s tendency to gradually decay into chaos, I ended up doing what I love this summer, and surrounded by some of the most interesting people I’ve met. One could not ask for more. But this begs the question, “Would I have made it into such […]

Why can’t we Bee friends? Bees (unsurprisingly) don’t do what I want them to Hi everyone, your favorite amateur beekeeper checking in! Since my last post, I’ve moved up to the exciting step of testing on a full hive! The good news is, I’ve gotten over any lingering fear of bees (see my first post). The […]