Tech Trek and Fellow Updates

Fresh, organic, locally sourced meditation researchLast Friday, Backyard Brains once again opened our doors (even wider–they’re always open during business hours!) to our fellow and aspiring citizen scientists as a part of this year’s Ann Arbor Tech Trek!  Dozens of local tech companies had their doors open to the public that evening and we, like our friends around town, had people streaming in from open to close! BYB has participated for the last few years, and it is always a hit.

For four hours on Friday afternoon, we were packed with people from all walks of life who were interested in learning about Backyard Brains and neuroscience! It was a day of education, outreach, and new connections. In the office, we demonstrated our classic, the Human to Human Interface, as well as The Claw, and we even helped people control Mario with their eye blinks!

Our Summer Fellows also got in on the action, presenting their work down in the Makerspace at All Hands Active. This was the first chance our fellows got to share their science with the community, letting people in on their secrets and experiment rigs. For example, Silkmoth Fellow Jess was running experiments on a cockroach antenna during Tech Trek: Some kids were watching when she used different odors to try to get a reaction in the antenna, as pictured below:

It was definitely a unique opportunity, full of its own trials. According to Mantis Shrimp Fellow Dan, “I was trying to collect behavioral data with the mantis shrimp while his implants were falling out, and people would come by who obligingly ooh-ed and ahh-ed at the prep and politely listened to my spiel about EMGs and the strike. I’ve never presented about my research while actively conducting it.”

Meet the Fellows, See the Projects

Catch up with our Fellows! Since our Fellowship started, each fellow has been hard at work on their summer research. Saw a cool project and you want to know more? Check out these posts introducing each Fellowship research track:

• Jess – No Nose, No Mouth, No Problems: the Silkmoth Story
• Jessica – Introducing Pavlov’s…Plants?
• Yifan – Know Your Birds
• Ilya – Neurorobot Vision
• Aaron – Nothing In Life Is Free
• Dan – Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em…Shrimps?!
• Anusha – Creating Professor X
• Molly – Bee-search: How Do Bees See
• Maria – Electric Relaxation
• Anastasiya – Secret Life of Jellyfish
• Ben – Python

First Progress Reports:

If you’ve been dying for an update on what we’ve been researching, fret no more! Feast your eyes on our first batch of updates!

• Jess – Becoming a #MothMom
• Jessica – Plant Nanny: If at first you don’t succeed, Try, try, try again
• Yifan – Human, Quiet, Crow: Teaching Computers to Distinguish Birdsong
• Ilya – Neurorobot on Wheels
• Dan – Mantis Shrimp: I Want You To Do Me A Favor. I Want You To Hit Me As Hard As You Can
• Molly – Bee-lieve You Can and You’re Halfway There: The Prototyping Process
• Aaron – Is It Actually My Choice To Not Title This Post?
• Anusha – In Search of the Mu Rhythm 
• Anastasiya – Jellies, and GUIs, and Costumes, Oh My!
• Maria – Meditation Data or Bust

Second Progress Reports:

Science marches ever onward! The Fellows have kept plugging away on their research in between all the fun and games, and here are their newest updates!

• Jess – Silk Moths, Enter The Arena: Binary Choice Paradigm
• Jessica – A Peagrim’s Progress, or, “Let’s get down to pea-zness”
• Ilya – Neurorobot Video Transmission In Progress
• Yifan – Volume Threshold for Songbird Audio
• Dan – Houston, we have a datum
• Molly – Beauty is in the eye of the Bee-holder: studies with a hive begin!
• Aaron – We don’t have free will. Change my mind.
• Anastasiya – On Set in the New Jellyfish Mobile Recording Chamber
• Anusha – …And I Almost Read His Mind!
• Maria – Fresh, organic, locally sourced meditation research

Conclusions:

The summer is winding down, and with it our Fellowship. While scientific exploration is never really finished, here are some wrap-ups from our Fellows on the projects they have devoted their inquiry to over the past weeks.

• Jess – Finishing the Silkmoth Story
• Jessica – New kid on the block
• Ilya – Quicker and Smarter: Neurorobot on the Hunt
• Yifan – Take a Step Back and look into the future
• Dan – Shrimp! Heaven! Now!
• Molly – From bee-fuddled to a bee-stower of knowledge: the end of my bee journey
• Anusha – Movement Mind Reader: Hopefully not the end…
• Ben – Summer Summary
• Anastasiya – The End of My Jellyfish Summer (Or Is It?)

Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em…Shrimps?!

Hi folks! My name is Dan and I am a student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst studying neuroscience and minoring in computer science. Back at school, I work in a songbird lab where I listen to neurons fire in zebra finches, and I’m on the ballroom dance team. Outside of working, sleeping, and eating, I’ve been rock climbing with the other Fellows and scouting out dance spots around town.

So at this point in 2018, I’m guessing a bunch of the people who will read this have at least heard about the focus of my project, mantis shrimps! Radiolab did a fabulous show about them and since then they’ve spread across the internet, so I was pretty darn excited when I found out I’d get to work with them this summer.

Mantis shrimp

Even though there are a million great resources on mantis shrimp, I’m going to take a shot at it here anyway. They’re prolific like ants and old like crocodiles; they comprise a few hundred species of related crustaceans can be found across the world’s temperate oceans, and they haven’t changed much for thousands of years. One species can be found along the Atlantic coast from Maine to Suriname! They range in size from less than an inch to more than a foot long, and several species are vibrantly rainbow colored. Despite their pleasant color, they are extremely aggressive and will attack just about anything. There are a ton of things about mantis shrimp that make them biologically unique and really important to study, but I’m going to talk about just one aspect of their behavior/physiology: their punch.

Most species of mantis shrimp are considered “spearers” or “smashers,” because they use an arm-like appendage called a maxilliped to either spear or smash their prey. I’m studying a smashing species called Odontodactylus scyllarus, or the peacock mantis shrimp. In addition to looking like a Christmas ornament, they pack a punch like no other animal, or even robot, on Earth. Their maxillipeds have an enlarged blunt “elbow” that they swing faster than a bullet (underwater no less! Try swinging a baseball bat underwater some time). The impact of their punch pushes all the water away from the point of impact, replacing it with gas the temperature of the surface of the sun, creating what’s called a cavitation bubble. The water then crashes back down around the bubble, creating an audible click, a flash of light, and an aftershock that hits the target like another punch. This is one reason scientists are curious about these guys: we can’t engineer something as hydrodynamic as their little rock’em sock’em maxillipeds. By the way, this kind of spring-loading is called power amplification.

How does the mantis shrimp still outpace modern engineering? I think I’ll get really into it in my next post, but the basic idea is that they store mechanical energy into a kind of biological spring on their armor, twitching muscles in the maxilliped. Each twitch pushes the spring further and further down until it releases a latch, and that elbow catapults out into a very unlucky crab, scientist’s finger, or aquarium glass (they have been known to crack and break).

My project

Our bodies produce a lot of electricity to do everyday things. The brain uses electricity to propagate information from one neuron to another, and we use electroencephalography, or EEG, to see how electricity use changes when we perform cognitive tasks. Electromyography, or EMG, is a way of visualizing the electrical activity of muscles. What I want to do for my project is capture the mantis shrimp EMG  (“electro” = electricity, “myo” = muscle, “graphy” = visualization) that reflects the buildup of mechanical energy before its strike, and then take a slow-motion of the strike. Maybe I’ll be able to see some cavitation! The EMG trace for mantis shrimp strikes is quite well studied. A fantastic paper on strike EMGs from 2015 (see below) shows a distinctive pattern of activation in the muscles. I’ll be looking for a similar kind of trace when I do my work.

Power-amplifying EMG trace from a mantis shrimp leading up to a strike

Before I can get started on that, I have to practice getting EMGs from other organisms that use power amplifications — specifically, crickets and grasshoppers. And cockroaches for the extra ew-factor. That’s what I have been doing for the past week: cobbling together a surgery rig, anesthetizing insects in ice, and implanting EMG probes. And it’s worked!

Cockroach EMG data I acquired the old-fashioned way: with an oscilloscope.

Further information on the mantis shrimp:

Radiolab

The Oatmeal

Welcome 2018 Backyard Brains Fellows!

From left: Ben, Anusha, Yifan, Jessica, Aaron, Jess, Greg Gage (not a Fellow), Maria, Dan, Anastasiya, Molly, Ilya

Meet the Fellows, See the Projects

The fellows are off to a great start! This week has been focused on them getting their feet wet with our kits and learning about what we do here at Backyard Brains. Be sure to keep checking back for their blog posts introducing their projects:

• Jess – No Nose, No Mouth, No Problems: the Silkmoth Story
• Jessica – Introducing Pavlov’s…Plants?
• Yifan – Know Your Birds
• Ilya – Neurorobot Vision
• Aaron – Nothing In Life Is Free
• Dan – Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em…Shrimps?!
• Anusha – Creating Professor X
• Molly – Bee-search: How Do Bees See
• Maria – Electric Relaxation
• Anastasiya – Secret Life of Jellyfish
• Ben – Python

As part of the fellowship, our new members will be keeping you updated with a number of blog posts, charting their summer research experiences. These posts are a great window in the world of citizen science! From start to finish, you can follow along with our fellows as they experience the triumphs and pitfalls of scientific inquiry.

You’ll be hearing a lot about our fellows and their projects for the next ten weeks. They’re excited to introduce themselves and their projects to you soon. Keep an eye out here, on our Facebook page, and Twitter for project updates and more!

Progress

The team has been working hard to bring their projects to life. Check out these first update blog posts on their rig construction and data collection efforts!

• Jess – Becoming a #MothMom
• Jessica – Plant Nanny: If at first you don’t succeed, Try, try, try again
• Yifan – Human, Quiet, Crow: Teaching Computers to Distinguish Birdsong
• Ilya – Neurorobot on Wheels
• Dan – Mantis Shrimp: I Want You To Do Me A Favor. I Want You To Hit Me As Hard As You Can.
• Molly – Bee-lieve You Can and You’re Halfway There: The Prototyping Process
• Aaron – Is It Actually My Choice To Not Title This Post?
• Anusha – In Search of the Mu Rhythm 
• Anastasiya – Jellies, and GUIs, and Costumes, Oh My!
• Maria – Meditation Data or Bust

Second Progress Reports:

Science marches ever onward! The Fellows have kept plugging away on their research in between all the fun and games, and here are their newest updates!

• Jess – Silk Moths, Enter The Arena: Binary Choice Paradigm
• Jessica – A Peagrim’s Progress, or, “Let’s get down to pea-zness”
• Ilya – Neurorobot Video Transmission In Progress
• Yifan – Volume Threshold for Songbird Audio
• Dan – Houston, we have a datum
• Molly – Beauty is in the eye of the Bee-holder: studies with a hive begin!
• Aaron – We don’t have free will. Change my mind.
• Anastasiya – On Set in the New Jellyfish Mobile Recording Chamber
• Anusha – …And I Almost Read His Mind!
• Maria – Fresh, organic, locally sourced meditation research

Conclusions:

The summer is winding down, and with it our Fellowship. While scientific exploration is never really finished, here are some wrap-ups from our Fellows on the projects they have devoted their inquiry to over the past weeks.

• Jess – Finishing the Silkmoth Story
• Jessica – New kid on the block
• Ilya – Quicker and Smarter: Neurorobot on the Hunt
• Yifan – Take a Step Back and look into the future
• Dan – Shrimp! Heaven! Now!
• Molly – From bee-fuddled to a bee-stower of knowledge: the end of my bee journey
• Anusha – Movement Mind Reader: Hopefully not the end…
• Ben – Summer Summary
• Anastasiya – The End of My Jellyfish Summer (Or Is It?)