During Backyard Brains’ recent visit to California, one of our events was at the Computer History Museum. We are geeks at heart: Our heroes consist of the trilogy of Woz, Engelbart, and Roberts. Tim and Greg have gazed longingly at the core memory units, the signed Apple I, the memory drums, and all the other […]

You’ve heard us say we were working on it. An idea, a dream, a fully portable electrophysiology rig with built-in amplifier, dissection scope, and manipulator for sophisticated experiments on the central nervous system. Impossible. But wait…maybe not? Ladies and Gentleman….the Ganglionizer.

Backyard Brains just returned from a packed trip to the Bay Area, where, among other things, the highlights included meeting the folks at MAKE Magazine. The night before our morning meeting, we were up late in the hotel making sure everything worked. Thankfully, everything was fully operational battle station, and we spent a good two […]

Though online retailers such as Mouser, Digikey, and Sparkfun have huge inventories and are cheaper, sometimes it’s just faster to drive over to RadioShack at Briarwood Mall and pick up a component. Plus, there’s the aesthetic appeal of holding parts in your hand, staring at them, and getting a sense of the final design. Many […]

Backyard Brains has been rather quiet over the holiday season, but we’ve been busy behind the scenes. Notably, co-founder Gregory Gage successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation in Biomedical Engineering on December 22nd. Congrats! Backyard Brains also met David Egner, head of the New Economy Initiative in Michigan, which is a sponsor of Tim’s Kauffman Postdoctoral […]

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 […]