As you know, Backyard Brains is a small start-up in the struggling state of Michigan. Last month, Ray Suarez and the crew from PBS came to highlight Ann Arbor, as one type of city in it’s Patchwork Nation project. The scope of this project is add granularity to gross segmentation of “blue states” vs. “read […]

ByB is back in Ann Arbor after a 1600 mile road trip to Boston and Ithaca to visit Harvard and Cornell. Our guest lecture for Professor Murthy’s neuroscience course went very well; in a first for ByB, the cigarette gatorade cricket ganglion experiment definitively worked! Too bad we weren’t recording the data. Tim put a […]

If you are in the Boston Area this week, come by Sever Hall, Room 202, at 2 PM this Friday the 20th, for a special lecture by ByB at the Neuroscience Course taught by Professor Venkatesh Murthy. Hecklers welcome, electronics heads even more (survey: what’s your favorite single-ended instrumentation amp?) Hope to see you there! […]

With elbow grease and many hours at his workshop then he would care to admit, Tim of ByB hunkered down and made a new SpikerBox by hand last week (as we finalize our production design), for an impending hard deadline of delivery by November 9th. Tim was sad to see this SpikerBox go..it was his […]

In a previous life, during our graduate work, Greg and Tim (along with co-conspirator Hirak Parikh), presented satirical neuroscience posters at the Society for Neuroscience conference. These eventually turned into papers in the Annals of Improbable Research (read about Stock Market Neurons and the Cingularity Apocalypse at your leisure), but our good friend Manfred Spitzer […]

Backyard Brains recently spent five days in Chicago for the Society for Neuroscience conference, which is the primo place to be to show off your latest discoveries on the workings of the mysterious brain. 30,000 people! and ByB is proud to say they were probably the first poster presenters since the annual meeting began in […]

As part of the new Kauffman Labs initiative, Tim of ByB was recently interviewed by Inc. Magazine. In 20 years, Tim hopes his last 7 years will be obsolete to the tune of scientific progress. Then, Oh Brave New World!, onwards to the declarative memory problem. 🙂

Ray Suarez, of the News Hour with Jim Lehrer, recently interviewed ByB for a TV feature on entrepreneurship, focusing on various towns in U.S. Hopefully we’ll make the cut for the show in December! Ray was a friendly fellow, asking a lot of questions about the neural signals, synapses, and cockroaches. In good humor, he […]

Tim recently taught the Neurophysiology Section of a Biomedical Engineering Course, “Quatitative Physiology,” at the University. Notably, this was the first time ByB did its cricket ganglia nicotine experiment in a public setting. Did it work? Maybe…the smooth metal of the desk table made the manipulator very slippery with its brick support, and holding onto […]

ByB applied last week to the second stage of the Zell Institute Dare to Dream grant. This grant, should we get it, will give us some funds for our initial runs of SpikerBoxes (stay tuned…we are close to final production). The grant, run every school semester by the UM Ross Business School, has three stages, […]

Concentrate Media, an Ann Arbor business magazine, recently interviewed Greg about ByB. You can read the article here. Note: The opinions of Greg Gage do not represent the opinions of ByB. We acknowledge that insect brains and human brains are different. Brief Primer for the newbies -Insects don’t have mylein sheaths on their axons. -Insects […]

We have good versions of our Ganglionizer (micromanipulator) and SpikerBox (amplifier), but the missing component for in vivo ganglia experiments is an inexpensive microscope. ByB saved its lunch money and recently purchased a 30X dissection scope for $60 from Benz Microscopy. Having no background in optics, ByB is rolling up its sleeves and reverse engineering […]