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 […]

We have received a fair bit of press the past week related to some of the community events we have done. In June Tim spoke at the Humanity Plus Summit at Harvard on the “Rise of the Citizen Scientist.” The room was jam-packed with “trans-humanists” and Tim was interviewed for a Boston Globe piece on […]

On July 20th and 21st, Backyard Brains ran part of the Health and Biomedical Engineering for Girls Camp, where, over the course of two days, 45 area high school girls learned about electronics and neuroscience. They built and soldered their own SpikerBoxes, and then used their new devices for their own neuroscience experiments. See below […]

Those of you in the Midwest, bring your families and friends to the Maker Faire at the Henry Ford Museum this weekend (July 31st and August 1st). Backyard Brains will be participating in this nerd paradise. Our exhibit number is 3534. Also, the “silent third” partner of Backyard Brains was recently highlighted by the University […]

Depending on what generation you are, you may fondly remember home-built AM radio kits. Backyard Brains is inspired by the amateur electronics heads of the 60’s and 70’s, and we now announce our SpikerBox “Bag of Parts” kit. You get the board, you get the chips, capacitors, and resistors, some instructions, and off you go! […]

Many users, while enjoying the SpikerBox demo’s we have done, have also expressed excited curiosity that the iPhone can be used as a portable data recorder / oscilloscope. To truly take advantage of your iPhone though, you want your signal to go directly to the line input. Though you can buy one of these cables, […]

The SpikerBox allows you to amplify and listen to spikes in a cheap, portable, and easy way. Using the built-in headphone jack you can also record the spikes from your SpikerBox on a computer, but we all know modern laptops are way too bulky and are beginning to go out of style. What if you […]

In early March, Backyard Brains made history by doing the first neural recordings on a commercial airline flight. As professional scientists however, we know that experiments should be repeated before conclusions are made. On a flight from Chicago to Kansas City in late April, we again performed the experiment. Before that though, during our layover […]