Whenever we work with K12 teachers or are in the classrooms ourselves, we are always delighted to hear about and see the enthusiasm that students have for engineering devices that help people. We like to call this “Tech that Helps.” As neuroscientists, we use lots of different tools to study, diagnose, and attempt to heal […]

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 […]

Hello, again. I’m Cort, the fly guy (I also do research with fruit flies) at Backyard Brains. Since the last time I posted I’ve made significant progress in my research! IT WORKS!!! In the above video what you’re seeing is one of the flies I’ve bred having its proboscis extension activated with an LED. Optogenetics works! Now […]

You know what’s great about fruit flies? Nothing.                       fig. 1 Fruit flies suck Nothing, that is, other than their benefit as a model organism for simple and fast transgenic experimentation — but who really cares about all that. Drosophila melanogaster are butts, so what if they could die? Well they can (vinegar and plastic-wrap), we don’t need […]

Hello all! The summer fellowship is officially over, but it’s not quite the end of the line for the jellies and me! In this final(?) update to my blog series I’ll be recalling the findings I’ve made over this summer, showcasing the poster I presented at the UROP Symposium, sharing my road trip back home […]

We’ll be your secret sauce, it’s worked before! In an effort to make neuroscience education accessible to everyone, we are always keeping our eyes peeled for grant funding opportunities! We are constantly on the lookout for programs we can recommend to teachers and admins who are excited about Neuroscience and STEM, but might not have the […]

Over a dozen busy bees, 5 research projects, 4 hot weeks of July, countless data, iterations and coffee cups, one book of experiments to soak it all up and present to the wider audience — and the Backyard Brains 2023 US-Serbian Summer Research Fellowship rounds off. The result will hit the shelves this fall, with […]

If you aren’t familiar, Donors Choose is like the Kickstarter for classrooms. Teachers who are hunting for funding to buy classroom supplies, tech, and tools can turn to their communities for support when the school’s budget can’t support them. This is an awesome opportunity for teachers to bring awareness to issues of classroom funding, to connect their classroom […]

Hey everyone! I’m Pablo, a junior from Nido de Aguilas High School in Santiago, Chile. In my free time, I like to doodle and run. My project is a multi-channel version of the experiment that my colleague and friend Cristian developed: it consists of using the SpikerShield Pro’s ability to get data from multiple channels […]

My name is Greg McMurtry. I am a sophomore at the University of Michigan studying mechanical engineering, and I have been working with Backyard Brains for the past four months. Currently, I am working with cockroaches and their descending contralateral movement detector “DCMD” neuron. Current research suggests that this neuron is correlated with the detection […]

I’m Alex, a neuroscience major from the wonderful Michigan State University (GO GREEN!)**, down in Ann Arbor for the summer as an intern with Backyard Brains. I’m working to be a behavior trainer of the cockroach, Periplaneta Americana, through means of operant conditioning. What is operant conditioning? In short, operant conditioning is a way of […]

Backyard Brains is now in its second year of interns from the University of Santiago de Chile (affectionately called Usach). Last year we had a project recording the ganglia of snails – and this we will continue our voyage in the world of invertebrates with an old favorite and a new favorite. Cockroaches and Clams. The […]