Ph.D. student and friend of Backyard Brains, Brinnae Bent of Duke University, recently hosted a class for seniors participating in the “Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Duke (OLLI at Duke).” With help from some colleagues at North Carolina State University, she put on an afternoon workshop in Electrophysiology for these lifelong learners. From its website, “OLLI […]

This Friday 3pm – 7pm, Backyard Brains will be hosting an open house as part of this year’s A2 Tech Trek! This is a fun, annual event which coordinates open houses at dozens of local tech companies. This event showcases the vibrant tech company and startup community in Ann Arbor and is a chance for […]

Backyard Brains was excited to participate in this years “Mini-Maker Faire,” hosted by the Ann Arbor District Library in downtown Ann Arbor. We enjoy attending these events, as they are a great opportunity to see what other members of the community are creating! The crowd was a mix of children, students, teachers, makers, enthusiasts, and […]

  Four more years… of Science! It is an exciting day at the Backyard Brains office! After much revision and consideration, we have secured further NIH grant funding to continue our development of neuroscience education tools and materials! If you are unfamiliar, the National Institute of Health (NIH) is a federal agency that is responsible for performing and funding […]

Hey hey! It’s Etienne Serbe again, with an update on BYB World NeuroTour! You’ve seen us in Germany, Portugal, and Brazil (see here and here). Now we’ve move onto Sao Paolo, Florianopolis, Montevideo, and Buenos Aires. We work with Universities on how to improve common neuroscience knowledge. We also spread the word outside of academia. […]

On June 17th, the A2 Tech Trek took place in downtown Ann Arbor hosted by Ann Arbor SPARK. The purpose of the Tech Trek was for ‘Downtown Ann Arbor technology companies opening their doors to the public’. Over 50 companies participated in this event with close to 500 people pre-registered. Backyard Brains participated in this year’s Tech Trek, […]

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 […]

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 […]

Last year, we launched our “human human interface” allowing a connection between complete strangers to be built artificially, bypassing chance. But there are those lucky people who don’t need a mechano-electrical connection, who say they simply “feel something” in the presence of another. Being in the same room together, subjects report feeling “warmer,” that there is […]

On January 1st, we received a New Year’s gift from another continent: Neuroscience tools and experiments made by a group of high school students selected from the 20 best rated schools of Iran. They were written lab reports, submitted for an interdisciplinary neuroscience competition that utilized our open source experiments with cockroaches as a resource […]

This past August, we were graciously invited by ZAST (Zhejiang Association for Science and Technology) to come to China to give a series of workshops and talks in Hangzhou, Ningbo, and Shanghai at the various impressive science museums there. Similarly to the United States, Neural Engineering is a relatively new discipline for the public, and […]

If you are nearby Oaxaca this coming weekend (March 22-23), we will be at the Maker Faire demonstrating neuroscience and also running Make and Take Workshops.  ¡Vamos a la tierra de Nahuatl y Chapulines! ¡Vengan ustedes para ver las espigas de neuronas y músculos!