If you’ve followed us over the past couple years, you’ll know we have been slowly working on a MicroManipulator to allow you to do more precise neural recordings instead of just “blindly” inserting electrodes in a cockroach leg, cricket, or earthworm. We’ve had prototypes of manipulators for about as long as we’ve been in existence, […]

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 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 […]

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 […]

While most of us were enjoying our relaxing summer vacations, our developer Nate was hard at work porting our Backyard Brains mobile application to the Android platform.  We have just released our first version to the Android Market, and Yes! it’s a free download.  We are happy to now add the android phones to our […]

You asked, we listened. See our newest experiment!  

We have been slowly rolling out our RoboRoach kits (we started shipping our beta units in late March 2011, and we have shipped 14 so far), and today we received some reports from the field. Robert Uglesich, a Professor at Cooper Union in Manhattan, used our RoboRoach kits this summer to teach high school students […]

After a month of exhausting collective bargaining negotiations, the Backyard Brains labor union has emerged with a new deal which brings not only organic/locally-grown lettuce for the cockroaches plus two new soldering irons for production, but more importantly the addition of 4 new faces to the Backyard Brains team! Please join us in welcoming […]

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 […]

Finances are on our collective minds as we all hurry to send in our taxes to the IRS this week, therefore we think this is a great time to announce somefinancialnews of our own. Starting with this year’s tax filing, we are making Backyard Brains open books, meaning that all employees (both of us) and […]