EAST VILLAGE — It would take more than a can of Raid to get rid of these "RoboRoaches."
A group of high school students participating in the Cooper Union’s internship program got a neurology lesson this summer by working with a set of creepy-crawly subjects — giant cockroaches affixed with circuit boards and electric sensors.
During the six-week program — in which 10 high school students from around the city worked under the tutelage of a Cooper Union professor — the budding neuroscientists used the sensors, attached to the three-inch roaches’ antennae, to manipulate their movements.
They also used the electrical impulses from pop music to get a reaction from the bugs, a giant species from Central America, discovering that the insects responded more to the non-repetitive riffs of rock bands like Weezer than the monotonous tunes of techno.
“The overall idea is to see if we can develop a device that can replace lost brain function,” said program instructor Robert Uglesich, a neuroscientist and professor of physics at the Cooper Union, noting that a roach's nervous system is similar to a human's.
Since the roaches use antennae to guide their movements, the students were able to remotely manipulate their movements using a number of stimuli — from a simple electrical charge to the hits of Lady Gaga.
“It gave us a lot of hands-on experience that we normally wouldn’t have in high school,” said Flora Tan, 17, who attends Staten Island Technical High School and was one of 110 participants in the school's summer internship programs, which covered a range of study areas.
One of her fellow interns saw the importance of the program in helping advance innovative technology.
“It’s just interesting how a small experience like this can develop into something bigger,” said Dumichel Harley, 15, of Regis High School on the Upper East Side. “We can develop this into a tool we can use in the future.”
The students were surprisingly comfortable working with their test subjects, saying any initial skittishness soon gave way to an affinity for the bugs.
“At first you think of them as the typical household pest, but you get used to it,” said Allen He, 17, of Brooklyn Technical High School. “I actually kind of like them.”
Fellow intern Bobby Zhou, 16, of Stuyvesant High School in lower Manhattan, was even considering taking one of the roaches home.
“In a sense, you can say they’re our pets,” he said.