During the days of January 8,9, and 10, 2014, Backyard Brains ran its most ambitious workshop yet – three days of teaching high school teachers how to build their own labs and teach neuroscience in their classroom. During this workshop, 6 teachers from Dunalistar High School in Las Condes, Santiago, learned: -How to record electrical activity from […]

We are big believers in the power of 3D printing to allow labs and scientists to share their inventions around the world, making experiments easier and scientific progress faster. We bought our first MakerBot in April of 2012, and our current “Fleet” of 3D printers at Backyard Brains now numbers three (two MakerBot Replicator Originals […]

Aprende neurociencia con El SpikerBox. Arma el Tuyo y Llévatelo. ¿Te intriga saber cómo funciona tu cerebro?, ¿Te has preguntado alguna vez cómo suenan y cómo se ven realmente las señales neuronales?, ¿Te gusta hacer experimentos? Bueno, ¡este es tu día de suerte! El objetivo de este taller es convertirte en todo un neurocientífico! Aprenderás las habilidades […]

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 […]

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 […]

It’s time for our second teacher workshop! In collaboration with the great folks at the SquareOne Education Network, we are hosting a teacher workshop on June 24th, 2011, whereby if you are a teacher within driving distance of the greater Detroit area, you can spend a day building your own SpikerBox amplifier and running experiments […]

Thanks to all who donated! The mission of FundScience is to get the public directly involved in funding scientific enterprise, so, of course, where did the $512.20 we raised actually go? Did it dump right into indirect costs? No way! Our organization develops low-cost neurotechnology, and the support of FundScience helped enable the building of […]

The annual Society for Neuroscience meeting is a big event for us; we prepare all year working on new prototypes and experiments for annual review by our colleagues, friends, and academic foes. This year was a special treat, as we were recognized for our outreach efforts by the Society itself, represented by President Michael Goldburg. Copyright […]

We’ve often been told “I’d love to make a SpikerBox kit, but I can’t solder!” Well, if you live near the Backyard Brains World Headquarters (a living room in Ann Arbor, MI) you are in luck. We are putting on a “Make and Take” workshop on Sunday, December 5th. This workshop will teach you everything […]

Another common request we get from users is “Can you stimulate the leg as well?” to which we have always replied, “Yes, there are some stimulation circuits we can build, we have that idea in the queue.” Which means, of course, that the idea is relegated to the backlog of the many cool things we […]

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 […]

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 […]