Our energetic team submitted a number of entries to the Royal Society’s Picturing Science competition.
Monthly Archives: April 2013
Kids Kabin in Walker
The time certainly does fly when you’re busy! Since my last blog post I have worked hard on the stimuli to get them to work as we hope they would, and have sorted out an occluder (something to block the edges of the screen from the viewer, so they can’t gauge the orientation of the screen). And I am now in the process of recruiting volunteers and running the experiment.
On Monday I helped out at an ION outreach programme at the Kids Kabin in Walker, an after-school club. School classes have been visiting the centre during school hours to learn different things not seen in a classroom such as pottery, cooking, and including a session on the brain ran by ION. In this session the children (varying age) are taught about how the brain works and how the different parts of the brain handle different tasks. They are engaged in activities they wouldn’t see normally such as the Stroop task (reading out the colour of the words font, rather than the name of the colour, for instance BLUE RED YELLOW would be RED GREEN BLUE and also wearing some custom made glasses which warp the view the of the world the child sees, which are worn and a simple task, like throwing a ball into a basket, is attempted. The emphasis of the classes is to teach the various regions of the cortex and how they work together to perform even simple tasks. The day was good fun for the kids and for the grown ups! Looking forward to going next week!
Welcome Ronny!
And I’m delighted to announce that Ronny Rosner is the third and final member of the M3 team. Ronny already has considerable experience studying neuronal processing by both behavioural and electrophysiological approaches in flies and locusts, including both extracellular and intracellular recordings. He’s currently in Uwe Homberg’s lab in Marburg, Germany. Ronny won’t be joining us till January 2014, though he will be visiting before then. He’s already spent a week visiting Newcastle, during which I took this photo of him in Claire Rind’s lab, about to dissect a mantis brain for us. Germany has a particularly strong tradition of insect neuroscience, so I’m delighted Ronny will be bringing that over to Newcastle to fuse with our existing insect and wider neurophysiology community. In fact I am really excited that I’ve managed to recruit such a talented team for the M3 project, and am looking forward eagerly to 5 years of fun science and productivity!
Mantid photos
Lisa’s been taking more fab photos of the mantids. They are so cool!
Here are some photos showing our experimental set-up.
Graphs are good
All week Lisa’s been a bit gloomy about the behaviour of the mantids. Apparently they have not been cooperating well, doing defensive postures at the screen or even jumping off their perch. But she’s plugged doggedly on with true PhD student grit :). Anyway, we just sat down and created a script to load up the Matlab files and graph such data as she has managed to collect. And it’s great! Really beautiful, does exactly what we expected, demonstrates our protocol is sensible and suggests it’s worth while proceeding to more interesting stimuli. Just goes to show, you don’t always have an accurate sense of how good your data is as it comes in.
In other news, Paul has taken delivery of a 3D Dell laptop. Having a few teething problems getting it to display in 3D, but I shall be very interested to see the results. MSc computing students Mike and Nick are starting their projects in the lab this week, and James is back from holiday. So it’s going to be a nice diverse lab meeting this Friday.
Welcome Ghaith!
Ghaith Tarawneh is the second person to accept one of the M3 positions. Ghaith is just writing up his PhD in Microelectronic Circuit Design in the Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering department here at Newcastle. He also has a MSc in Mechatronics from Newcastle (where he was the highest-ranking student), and a BSc in Computer Engineering from Princess Sumaya University for Technology in Jordan (where he was the highest-ranking student – spot the pattern). He has skills in just about everything electronic, computer or programming-related. In the initial phase of the project, Ghaith’s technical wizardry is going to be essential for key challenges like automated recognition of mantis behaviour and displaying 3D images to insect eyes. Longer-term, Ghaith is keen to move into the computational neuroscience aspects of the project, figuring out the circuits which underlie mantis vision. Given the “machine” aspect of the M3 project, it’s an intriguing thought that Ghaith has the skills to implement these computations in hardware as well as in software if he so desires.
Ghaith will be the first RA to start work on the project, with a start date of 1st June if all goes well.
Yoshifumi’s visit July 2012
Gallery
Yoshifumi Yamawaki kindly came to visit us in July 2012 and gave us some tuition in mantid experimental techniques. We didn’t have a lab blog at the time, but I thought I should do a post about it.Here, he shows … Continue reading
Welcome Vivek!
Delighted to welcome Vivek Nityananda as the first of the three Leverhulme-funded research associates working on the “Man, Mantis and Machine” project. Vivek currently holds a Marie Curie International Incoming Fellowship from the European Union. For this, he’s working on visual search and attention in bumblebees with Prof Lars Chittka at Queen Mary, London. Previously, he’s worked on acoustic communication in frogs and bush-crickets at the University of Minnesota and the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. Vivek will be starting work on the M3 project once his Marie Curie fellowship has finished in September. I’m delighted he’ll be joining us, and look forward to a highly productive time together.
Tantalising a mantis
Very excited that Lisa has been making great progress with the mantid behaviour experiments. Here is a video showing 3 trials of one of Lisa’s mantids performing a visual tracking task. The mantis is being filmed from underneath as it hangs from a stand – they seem happiest when upside-down. In front of the mantis is a CRT monitor where we are displaying the visual stimuli in the experiment. You’ll hear a Ping! when a fixation stimulus appears on the screen. This is a “simulated bug” which runs around in a spiral in towards the centre of the screen. This ensures the mantid begins each trial looking at the centre of the screen. Then you’ll hear a second Ping! as the bug starts to run either left or right (the tracking stimulus). Watch the mantis go mad as it tries to get its claws on the little beastie!
M3
Spent some time this morning with Lisa coding up a stimulus she thought might attract the mantids’ attention. Apparently it worked – the first time she presented it, the mantis leapt right off its perch onto the screen!