**Edit: The Heart & Brain SpikerShield has been replaced by the Heart & Brain SpikerBox!** The Backyard Brains Heart and Brain SpikerShield is pretty amazing-you can use it to look at both the electrical activity of your heart (across your wrists even!) and the rhythmic electrical activity of your brain. As with all our products however, this wasn’t […]

From previous neural recordings, I have data of the spikes of the TSDNs. However, I had yet to find a way to record the onset of the stimulus (turning on the laser) so that I could correlate it to the spikes. In order to both simultaneously record the event of the laser turning on and […]

I went out to the field in Ann Arbor, MI yesterday and in my mind, I wanted to catch at least 20 grasshoppers to last me about two weeks of data collection. After two hours of navigating through a vast tall grass field in the Nichols Arboretum in the scorching summer heat, I had to […]

More clearly explained, inject the snail before it hides behind its trap door anyway. For the past 2 weeks, I’ve had considerable trouble getting the needle into the snail to inject it with the anesthesia solution before the snail locked itself away in its trap door. It’s actually a very fast and strong protection mechanism, […]

Below is the preliminary design for my electrophysiology setup. The Backyard Brains SpikerBox has a piece of cardboard on top, so after being anesthetized in ice, the little grasshopper will chill out there for the experiment, which would last about an hour. The grasshopper’s belly (ventral side) would face up, so I can place the […]

Neural recordings: Yesterday, I recorded from the neuron of the dragonfly without the lasers, just to ensure the materials are working and that I can find the TSDNs. For the neural recordings of the dragonfly, I aimed to place the electrode in the TSDN. These neurons run down the dragonfly’s neck, on the right and left […]

Catching the dragonflies: The first step of my project is to collect the dragonflies. Dragonflies love vegetation near waterways (rivers, streams, ponds, lakes etc.) All you need to catch them is a butterfly net and a mesh cage. Once I caught enough, I put the dragonflies in individual cups and place them in the refrigerator (this […]

I have chosen the bugs with alien heads as my study organism for this vision neuroscience project, and so the first step is to seek out existing knowledge and familiarize myself with the grasshopper’s morphology and neuroanatomy. Grasshoppers belong to the kingdom Animalia, phylum Arthopoda, class Insecta– the largest and most biodiverse group of animals on […]

Two students from Stone Magnet Middle School in Florida, with the guidance of their teacher, Richard Regan, decided to make their science projects in neuroscience. We feel we’ve accomplished our core mission by just being able to write this statement:  that today it is an option for students in middle school to make neuroscience experiments […]

Welcome to the cockroach world!     My work for these five weeks was to develop a novel low-cost system to study the circadian rhythm of cockroaches. I’m working with my beautiful friends discoid cockroaches (B. discoidalis).     Circadian rhythms are physical, mental, and behavioral changes that follow a roughly 24-hour cycle, responding primarily to light and darkness in an […]

Welcome! This is Kylie Smith, a Michigan State University undergraduate writing to you from a basement in Ann Arbor. I am studying behavioral neuroscience and cognition at MSU and have been fortunate enough to have landed an internship with the one and only Backyard Brains for the summer. I am working on The Consciousness Detector […]

Coming soon to a backyard near you. At least, that’s the idea. We’re sure the technology will catch up if we give it enough prodding and throw an intern or two its way. And hey if not? There’s still lasers, sounds like a win/win to me. Wait we don’t get lasers either? This is really going […]