Backyard Brains recently spent five days in Chicago for the Society for Neuroscience conference, which is the primo place to be to show off your latest discoveries on the workings of the mysterious brain. 30,000 people! and ByB is proud to say they were probably the first poster presenters since the annual meeting began in […]

As part of the new Kauffman Labs initiative, Tim of ByB was recently interviewed by Inc. Magazine. In 20 years, Tim hopes his last 7 years will be obsolete to the tune of scientific progress. Then, Oh Brave New World!, onwards to the declarative memory problem. 🙂

Ray Suarez, of the News Hour with Jim Lehrer, recently interviewed ByB for a TV feature on entrepreneurship, focusing on various towns in U.S. Hopefully we’ll make the cut for the show in December! Ray was a friendly fellow, asking a lot of questions about the neural signals, synapses, and cockroaches. In good humor, he […]

Tim recently taught the Neurophysiology Section of a Biomedical Engineering Course, “Quatitative Physiology,” at the University. Notably, this was the first time ByB did its cricket ganglia nicotine experiment in a public setting. Did it work? Maybe…the smooth metal of the desk table made the manipulator very slippery with its brick support, and holding onto […]

ByB applied last week to the second stage of the Zell Institute Dare to Dream grant. This grant, should we get it, will give us some funds for our initial runs of SpikerBoxes (stay tuned…we are close to final production). The grant, run every school semester by the UM Ross Business School, has three stages, […]

Concentrate Media, an Ann Arbor business magazine, recently interviewed Greg about ByB. You can read the article here. Note: The opinions of Greg Gage do not represent the opinions of ByB. We acknowledge that insect brains and human brains are different. Brief Primer for the newbies -Insects don’t have mylein sheaths on their axons. -Insects don’t really have a […]

We have good versions of our Ganglionizer (micromanipulator) and SpikerBox (amplifier), but the missing component for in vivo ganglia experiments is an inexpensive microscope. ByB saved its lunch money and recently purchased a 30X dissection scope for $60 from Benz Microscopy. Having no background in optics, ByB is rolling up its sleeves and reverse engineering […]

ByB has had magnificent success using Audacity to view and record their neural data, and Tim has begun thinking about modifying Audacity to contain a digital oscilloscope mode. Here is what he wrote to the Audacity team: Hi folks, I just sent an e-mail regarding getting Audacity to work on the OLPC (one labtop per child) project, […]

While Greg and Evan have been working on modifying the Measure program on the OLPC (one laptop per child) in order to view and store neural data (the current build can’t store data, and it needs a trigger function and better visualization), Tim has been experimenting with the Audacity program. This is the same program […]

Tim Marzullo, co-founder, received a phone call last week (while on his bike) that he will be funded for a year to grow Backyard Brains. Thanks to the Kauffman Foundation and the Michigan New Economy Initiative for believing in us!

Backyard brains was pleased to participate in the Health and Biomedical Sciences Summer Camp put on by UofM’s Women in Science and Engineering organization. The H&BS camp was a week-long set of activities with the goal of giving high school students hands-on experience in different health science related fields, and to broaden their perspectives about […]

While Tim was on a roadtrip for an interview with the Kauffman foundation, he made a pit stop in Salt Lake City to visit some friends at Ripple. While we at Backyard Brains pride ourselves on our single channel neurophysiology, the engineers at Ripple are designing a >1000 channel neurophysiology system! We picked their brains […]