Flying back from a successful trip from California, Tim and Greg of Backyard had decided there was time for one more experiment… Thanks to the kind TSA folks at the San Francisco International Airport and Delta airlines, we were able to record spikes in flight. Quite possibly the first neurons ever recorded on a commercial […]

You’ve heard us say we were working on it. An idea, a dream, a fully portable electrophysiology rig with built-in amplifier, dissection scope, and manipulator for sophisticated experiments on the central nervous system. Impossible. But wait…maybe not? Ladies and Gentleman….the Ganglionizer.

Backyard Brains just returned from a packed trip to the Bay Area, where, among other things, the highlights included meeting the folks at MAKE Magazine. The night before our morning meeting, we were up late in the hotel making sure everything worked. Thankfully, everything was fully operational battle station, and we spent a good two and […]

Read an interview with UM senior Ahmed Suhaib that appeared in today’s issue of the Michigan Daily discussing Backyard Brain’s collaboration with the Biomedical Engineering Design Program to help design our RoboRoach. Stay tuned, as we work to bring you this and other exciting products in the near future!

Though online retailers such as Mouser, Digikey, and Sparkfun have huge inventories and are cheaper, sometimes it’s just faster to drive over to RadioShack at Briarwood Mall and pick up a component. Plus, there’s the aesthetic appeal of holding parts in your hand, staring at them, and getting a sense of the final design. Many […]

Tired of having to dampen those sponges, and adding fresh potatoes for your cockroaches during these dry winter months? Well, this may be the solution for you. Here’s what you’ll need: Twine (We borrowed some from Colin Stoetzner’s science video art project) Shampoo/Mouthwash sampler bottle Pair of Scissors Cockroaches (Optional) Simply poke a hole in the top of the bottle, […]

Backyard Brains has been rather quiet over the holiday season, but we’ve been busy behind the scenes. Notably, co-founder Gregory Gage successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation in Biomedical Engineering on December 22nd. Congrats! Backyard Brains also met David Egner, head of the New Economy Initiative in Michigan, which is a sponsor of Tim’s Kauffman Postdoctoral Fellowship. […]

As you know, Backyard Brains is a small start-up in the struggling state of Michigan. Last month, Ray Suarez and the crew from PBS came to highlight Ann Arbor, as one type of city in it’s Patchwork Nation project. The scope of this project is add granularity to gross segmentation of “blue states” […]

ByB is back in Ann Arbor after a 1600 mile road trip to Boston and Ithaca to visit Harvard and Cornell. Our guest lecture for Professor Murthy’s neuroscience course went very well; in a first for ByB, the cigarette gatorade cricket ganglion experiment definitively worked! Too bad we weren’t recording the data. Tim put a […]

If you are in the Boston Area this week, come by Sever Hall, Room 202, at 2 PM this Friday the 20th, for a special lecture by ByB at the Neuroscience Course taught by Professor Venkatesh Murthy. Hecklers welcome, electronics heads even more (survey: what’s your favorite single-ended instrumentation amp?) Hope to see you there! And […]

With elbow grease and many hours at his workshop then he would care to admit, Tim of ByB hunkered down and made a new SpikerBox by hand last week (as we finalize our production design), for an impending hard deadline of delivery by November 9th. Tim was sad to see this SpikerBox go..it was his […]

In a previous life, during our graduate work, Greg and Tim (along with co-conspirator Hirak Parikh), presented satirical neuroscience posters at the Society for Neuroscience conference. These eventually turned into papers in the Annals of Improbable Research (read about Stock Market Neurons and the Cingularity Apocalypse at your leisure), but our good friend Manfred Spitzer […]