Kafka couldn’t have imagined it better. Two specimens of the cockroach phylum were going about their business in a Myanmar cave about 99 million years ago. One day they got trapped in tree resin, which then turned to amber and preserved their little bodies to this day to tell us an impressive tale of time, […]

You never know what might capture a students’ attention and passion… Maybe the recent photo of a black hole inspires a student to learn about astrophysics, or maybe an experiment involving cockroaches inspires a student to want to learn more about neuroscience! Recently, we heard word from two graduating high school seniors in Ohio who started […]

Welcome to the cockroach world!     My work for these five weeks was to develop a novel low-cost system to study the circadian rhythm of cockroaches. I’m working with my beautiful friends discoid cockroaches (B. discoidalis).     Circadian rhythms are physical, mental, and behavioral changes that follow a roughly 24-hour cycle, responding primarily to light and darkness in an […]

My name is Greg McMurtry. I am a sophomore at the University of Michigan studying mechanical engineering, and I have been working with Backyard Brains for the past four months. Currently, I am working with cockroaches and their descending contralateral movement detector “DCMD” neuron. Current research suggests that this neuron is correlated with the detection […]

Hey, it’s Olivier*! Since I last posted a few developments have occured. First off, I have excelled in the surgical prep portion of my project so much so that I am able to perform two surgeries within the span of an hour and then I can give them a two hour rest so that I […]

PEPPERMINT IS THE NEW VANILLA: CHANGING OLFACTORY MEMORIES THROUGH OPERANT CONDITIONING IN COCKROACHES (my working paper title, you dig it?) Hey all, it’s Alex again! I have completed quite a bit since my previous post. If you already forgot about who I am (you monster!), I’m the intern performing the operant conditioning research on cockroaches! I’m […]

I’m Alex, a neuroscience major from the wonderful Michigan State University (GO GREEN!)**, down in Ann Arbor for the summer as an intern with Backyard Brains. I’m working to be a behavior trainer of the cockroach, Periplaneta Americana, through means of operant conditioning. What is operant conditioning? In short, operant conditioning is a way of […]