These past few months we’ve been hard at work adding more experiments to our online library. We just released two new ones!
New Experiment I: Why do your muscles get tired?, illustrated by Cristina Mezuk, our resident favorite artist in Ann Arbor
New Experiment II: What is the effect of temperature on conduction velocity?, illustrated by a Chilean Comic Book Artist Italo Ahumada.
Happy Discoveries!
We recently spent 2 days at SONA, the Society of Neuroscience Africa conference that occurs every two years. This year, it was in Rabat, Morroco, and we had a talk on low cost ways to do high tech neuroscience. We brought a ton on inventory with us, and we are happy to report we have scientists in Morocco, Nigeria, Kenya, Ethiopia, Mali, Uganda, and Cameroon now all bringing back gear to their growing labs. They are putting us to work! with custom requests to modify our Manipulators and Scopes, and also to move faster on our DC amp prototypes that will allow EKG and whole cell recording.
We were also more than happy to donate 8 SpikerBox Bundles (4 regular, 4 EMG) to the TReND (Teaching and Research in Neuroscience for Development in Africa) program. Sadiq Yusuf, of Kampala International University, is co-director of TReND and he, along with Lucia Prieto Godino, Tom Baden, and Jimena Berni, is building a training course in neurophysiology currently taking place in Uganda that is open to African undergraduate and graduate students studying neuroscience. This course is based on the “Neural Systems and Behavior Course” from the Marine Biological Laboratory, which is dear to our hearts. They have already been up and running for two years, running workshops in the summers. We thank TReND for inviting us; we met many new colleagues and customers challenging us to build more and more powerful and portable tools.
Years in the making, we officially launch our “Completo,” which combines our Manipulator, RoachScope, SpikerBox, and beautiful poplar wooden steel table into a single rig for those neuroscientists on the go. We have successfully used it to record muscle potentials from fruit flies, carefully position electrodes on earthworm nerves, and measure adaptation rates in cockroach sensory neurons. What will you discover? Available Now. Works with any smartphone with a camera. Scope and Manipulator have magnets built into base to stay stably attached to metal table.
Update: Within a couple hours of this announcement, we had our first sale of the “Completo.” Professor Ian Harrington, Director of the Neuroscience Program at Augustana College, is the proud owner of the first production unit! He plans to use it for a Science Academy he is helping run this summer as part of Augustana’s high school outreach. Ian is also a former labmate of ours from waaayyyy back; Ian was a post-doc in an auditory neuroscience lab at U-Michigan when co-founder TM was a first year rotating graduate student in 2002. Thanks as always for your support Ian!
