• “Cerebros del patio trasero” visita a Tejas del Oeste y lleva potenciales de acción al desierto
    Education
    We are proud to have run many workshops in the Midwest, but co-founder Tim has longed to bring spikes to the Texas plains he recalls from his early years (he graduated from high school in El Paso and went to college in Austin). Thus, it was with great delight when Emily Verla Bovino, artist-in-residence with […]
  • 2-Channel SpikerBox Now Available. Measure Neuron Speed in Earthworms.
    Education
    We hereby announce our 2-Channel SpikerBox. What can you do with it? Why, you can measure the speed of spikes as they travel down a nerve, in a truly “backyard” preparation using Earthworms. See our full experiment write up on how to do it! How fast is a spike? Faster than a car, faster than […]
  • Backyard Brains Returns to the Nature Neuroscience Podcast, unveils Optogenetics Prototype
    Hardware
    Coming to the Society for Neuroscience meeting is always great fun for us, and it was especially true this year as we unveiled the third generation of our optogenetic prototype and actually did some experiments at our poster! Earlier this year we sponsored a student design effort to build a portable optogenetic rig using cholinergic […]
  • Biz
    We began distributing SpikerBoxes on April 8th, 2010, and we are proud to announce that on June 15th, 2011, we shipped our 500th SpikerBox! The proud owner is a high school teacher in Minnesota who ordered 12 “Bags of Parts” for students to build and experiment with this summer. You can see our complete user […]
  • Backyard Brains sells to 100th customer
    Marketing
    We are pleased to announce that ProfessorMichael Ferragamo of Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota is our 100th customer! He is the proud owner of SpikerBox #266 (some customers have bought more than one!). Michael plans to use his SpikerBox for local high school outreach. So where on this great planet have all these 266 […]
  • Backyard Brains appears in Wired Magazine
    Marketing
    For the past nine years, Tim has had a subscription to Wired Magazine, and he always read the articles on the internet revolution, learning about the drama, personalities, and technology involved with the rapidly changing world of computers. Longingly, he has despaired, wishing neuroscience and biology R&D could be similarly fast with low barriers to […]
  • Backyard Brains Receives Gracious Pro Bono Modeling Work
    Marketing
    Fellow engineers and scientists, you who see the term “modeling” and believe we are speaking of CAD drawings or Spice Simulations, we can assure you we are much less sophisticated and much more shallow. We are talking about hot people, and hot people holding our hot products. Last Friday as we were walking to our […]
  • Recording from Cricket Cercal Ganglia
    Education
    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 […]
  • Backyard Brains featured on Boing Boing, Boston Globe, and Nature.com
    Biz
    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 […]
  • Let a thousand neurons fire
    Education
    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 […]
  • Now offering DIY
    Hardware
    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! […]
  • How to Roll Your Own iPhone Data Recording Cable
    Hardware
    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, […]