Hi, the electric fish project is going swimmingly! I designed a bandpass filter circuit with cut-off frequencies = 159.155 Hz and 15.9155 kHz to remove unwanted noise from the recorded electric organ discharges (collected using electrodes placed close to the elephant nose fish inside the fish tank), and an amplifier with a gain of around […]

Hey there! Zach here with the Songbird Identification project for a quick update. Since the last post, I’ve been hard at work creating a prototype device to listen for and record songbirds. I began by creating a small circuit using a microphone and amplifier chip. This acts as a sound recorder and also includes circuitry […]

Oh hey there! Long time no see, why don’t you have a seat and hear what I’ve been up to since my last blog update. If you were at the Ann Arbor 4th of July parade you might have seen me dressed up as a beautiful purple octopus (or maybe it was a squid? The […]

Hello everyone! It’s a been over a month since my project began on studying the diet and attempting taste manipulation of the Drosophila melanogaster. Before my experiments could begin I faced many software and hardware issues. The flyPAD itself is an extremely thin 0.6mm PCB board so every slight bend of it can result in […]

Changing Course In my last post, I talked about how I was essentially replicating the Paloma article (previously linked) in a DIY manner. This is no longer the case. The primary goal at this point is to record from the TSDN tracts, located on the ventral portion of the dragonfly’s “neck” area (seen as two […]

G’day again! I’ve got data… and it is beautiful! More on this below… I am pleased to update my progress on my BYB project, Human EEG visual decoding! If you missed it, here’s the post where I introduced my project! Since my first blog post, I have collected the data from 6 subjects with the […]

Are you fast enough to catch a grasshopper with your bare hands? Might be tricky, because grasshoppers are quick to react to potential threats! This reaction time is thanks to a very specific, visual neural circuit in the grasshopper. By recording from this circuit in a living grasshopper prep, we can record the spikes that […]

Introduction to the project … Hi, everyone! Last week marked the halfway point of my time as a fellow here at Backyard Brains!  Recently, I’ve succeeded in building a rig and recording video footage of my Squid Hatchlings! I’m excited because it means I can start gathering quantifiable data! The squiddos have kept me pretty busy during […]

Who would have thought a summer fellowship would grant you sleep sessions during work hours! Not just that, but it also comes with the ability to explore the deepest phases of sleep and access to unlimited Delta waves that come in all shapes and heights! Well, that can only happen at Backyard Brains, right from […]

Introduction to the Project Hi, Haley again!! It’s been an exciting couple of weeks- I’ve become more familiar with mosquitoes than I ever thought I would, learned a TON more Matlab, and even got a few recordings!! My work recently has focused on perfecting the methodology needed to successfully tether a mosquito in a position […]

Hi! I’m Shreya and I just graduated from the Dwarkadas J. Sanghvi College of Engineering affiliated to the University of Mumbai in Electronics Engineering. During the last two years of my undergraduate study, I spent most of my vacations, free time and some weekends working as a research intern at the Indian Institute of Technology […]

This past Friday, Backyard Brains held an Open House as a part of this year’s Ann Arbor Tech Trek! Dozens of local tech companies had their doors open to the public that evening and we, like our friends around town, had people streaming in from open to close! The day began with “Tech Talks” at […]