Hot off the presses! Read all about it! Mantis Shrimp Wrangler Extraordinaire Dan has been published! Backyard Brains Senior Fellow Dan Pollack has had his research published in JUNE, the Journal for Undergraduate Neuroscience Education: “An Electrophysiological Investigation of Power-Amplification in the Ballistic Mantis Shrimp Punch.” The paper offers a rundown of Dan’s research, culminating in […]

Hello all! The summer fellowship is officially over, but it’s not quite the end of the line for the jellies and me! In this final(?) update to my blog series I’ll be recalling the findings I’ve made over this summer, showcasing the poster I presented at the UROP Symposium, sharing my road trip back home […]

I didn’t write a lot of blog posts this summer because I didn’t have my own research project, but the other research projects kept me plenty busy. I converted over an old BYB library written in a pricy programming language called Matlab into a free open source language called Python. I also cleaned it up […]

I write this on the last day of the fellowship. With a really heavy heart. Eleven weeks went past really fast. Although I shall be back again in Ann Arbor for school in September, it won’t be the same. This was one of the best summers I’ve ever had. I will surely miss everyone at […]

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 […]