Our engineering department is working hard on the next generation of the SpikerBox. The chief user request we’ve received is to make the SpikerBox louder; in fact, loud enough for large classrooms. Below is the audio component of our circuit, using the infamous LM386. Making this audio component both loud AND stable has been a […]

The annual Society for Neuroscience meeting is a big event for us; we prepare all year working on new prototypes and experiments for annual review by our colleagues, friends, and academic foes. This year was a special treat, as we were recognized for our outreach efforts by the Society itself, represented by President Michael Goldburg. […]

For the past nine years, Tim has had a subscription to Wired Magazine, and he always read the articles on the internet revolution, learning about the drama, personalities, and technology involved with the rapidly changing world of computers. Longingly, he has despaired, wishing neuroscience and biology R&D could be similarly fast with low barriers to […]

We’ve often been told “I’d love to make a SpikerBox kit, but I can’t solder!” Well, if you live near the Backyard Brains World Headquarters (a living room in Ann Arbor, MI) you are in luck. We are putting on a “Make and Take” workshop on Sunday, December 5th. This workshop will teach you everything […]

Another common request we get from users is “Can you stimulate the leg as well?” to which we have always replied, “Yes, there are some stimulation circuits we can build, we have that idea in the queue.” Which means, of course, that the idea is relegated to the backlog of the many cool things we […]

Here at Backyard Brains, we often get the question “Is that leg really still alive?” to which we respond “Why yes… that’s why you hear the Spikes”. The follow up question “How does it stay alive?” was often replied with similar authority: “They have tiny holes called spiracles that allow them to ‘breathe’ through their […]

Fellow engineers and scientists, you who see the term “modeling” and believe we are speaking of CAD drawings or Spice Simulations, we can assure you we are much less sophisticated and much more shallow. We are talking about hot people, and hot people holding our hot products. Last Friday as we were walking to our […]

Does the SpikerBox work on anything other than a cockroach leg? Yes, you can record from any invertebrate central nervous system but you often need a manipulator to accurately position your electrode. One of our users, Professor Walton Jones at the KAIST University in South Korea, recently experimented on the cricket cercel system. To those […]

Many users have e-mailed us, curious, bewildered, and frustrated by their lack of education in cockroach husbandry. We know, we know, some skills are just not taught in today’s educational system. But, in 100 words or less, here we describe how to take care of your humble cockroaches. 1. We prefer to buy small terrariums […]

Perhaps, dear customer, you wonder how we keep costs low? Here we remove the curtain off our factory floor to show our production staff: We offer door to door bus service: We have found that small hands are optimal for cutting the circuit boards: Taking a hint from our friends at Hewlett-Pakard (recent firing decision […]

Blast you noise! Where do you come from! What do you want! Leave me alone! Sadly, to the neuroscientist, and indeed every scientist, noise is just a part of the natural world. But, since it is of the natural world, you can try to understand it, perhaps even reduce its effect on the phenomena you […]

Many people have asked us if the cockroach legs we cut off and use for our experiments grow back on the respective owners. That and “the cockroach leg is still alive when removed from the body?” are the two most common questions we get, from 5 year olds up to 80 year olds. After a […]