There’s always a good deal of creativity, laughter and general joie de vivre at our booth, but this year’s SfN (Society for Neuroscience) conference got another layer of novelty: knitted bugs and brains in wheelbarrows.
If you’re thinking that we’ve started making 3D knitted swag, you’re in the wrong. These were in fact gifted to our wonderful team leader Stefana by her friend Marina so that she could bring them over to Chicago for SfN 2024. Hereby we thank both Stefana and Marina. We also promise to take great care of the goodies and adorn each of our booths with them wherever we may go.
Calls for applications for 2025 Brain Awareness Week are out! Apply by 31st October to get up to $1,250 towards your BAW event that will highlight the importance of neuroscience for our societies.
As you may know already, Brain Awareness Week takes place mid-March annually in just about every corner of the planet. In 2025, it officially falls between March 10th and 16th. If that doesn’t work for you but you’d still like to take part in the global initiative, you can still get the funding as long as your program has to do with neuroscience and carries the official signage of Dana and IBRO.
First of all, any organization can apply! Unlike in previous years, there are no eligibility restrictions in terms of your organization’s legal form. Previously, the focus used to be on organizations registered as public charities, educational institutions or small businesses.
Secondly, while all neuroscience programs are welcome, they’ll prioritize the multidisciplinary ones that have to do with neuroscience and society. They cite the fields of ethics, law, humanities, medicine, arts, social sciences, policy, education, journalism and public engagement as possible intersections. But those are just examples. To them we add robotics, machine learning and brain-machine interfaces like the ones we made this summer!
As always, applicants who work in underserved communities stand the best chance of getting funded. Also, you can use the money towards buying equipment that you get to keep after Brain Awareness Week! Perfect chance to avail your organization of some BYB gear (or even our complete portable lab bundle) if you haven’t already.
How to Apply?
All you need to do is head over here to register. This year, they simplified the process through SurveyMonkey so that you can do it using your Google account. Then, you’ll have to fill out a form with several details about your organization, its past involvement in Brain Awareness Week if any, as well as your proposal for 2025.
As a registered user, you’ll also gain access to a range of IBRO’s other grants, including funding of travel, parenthood and conference.
Yes! Just like every other year, Dana Foundation is partnering up with Federation of European Neuroscience Societies (FENS) to offer up to EUR 1,000 per project towards organizing 2025 Brain Awareness Week. The deadline for European applicants is shorter though, and they need to apply by October 3, 2024.
You might want to try and weigh up the cost to a cockroach that loses a leg against the benefit of getting more kids interested in neuroscience so that some could one day become scientists and maybe find a cure for Alzheimer’s.
Showing how plants react to different stimuli including pain can also be part of this discussion. We’ve recently had a peer-reviewed study by high-schoolers who put together an open-source library of plant responses and behavior. The experiment is very easy to do, and best of all, anybody can contribute to the online library with their findings!
How to Make Neuroprosthetics Cheaper & Accessible to Everyone
Another societal question is that of neuroprosthetics as a life-changing technology that still has a long way to go to become universally accessible.
Over the years, we’ve seen many brilliant attempts to build custom prosthetical tools using our gear, like this prosthetic finger made by a high-schooler, or the mirror stimulation attempt by an amateur scientist who wanted to treat his spinal cord injury. These and many other projects have done the first step in science: proving that innovation doesn’t only live in big labs, but in any curious soul.
The 1st edition of our MIT Press book also comes with 50+ open-ended experiments. And if you’re a fan of classic human, animal or plant electrophysiology, we’ve got you covered with 5 of our all-time favorites that have already made an amazing track record in scicomm around the world.
This summer, we didn’t take a spin on the world’s oldest Ferris wheel that’s still in use. (Late June was just too hot for that.) Nor did we manage to take a bite of Sacher Cake or Viennese Schnitzel famous the world over.
So what did we do in Vienna apart from admiring the city itself? We demoed our classic neuroscience experiments, but also took a spin at presenting new ones that are poised to mark the beginning of a new Backyard Brains era!
The video above shows the Neurorobot, a wheeled brain that lets you code its behavior by building neural networks akin to those in our own brains. It’s a venture into computational neuroscience where you can use an intuitive drag-and-drop interface to add neurons, set up their properties and how active they are supposed to be, connect them with sensors, motors, speakers and a mic through synapses of different weights, and even reinforce chosen behaviors with dopamine to learn about neuroplasticity.