— Written by Petar Damjanovic — If I were to show you a photo of a Rolex watch and a face of an unknown person, you’d probably be more interested in the prestigious, shiny object than the random stranger, right? However — and this may come as a surprise — your brain is much more modest […]

The Backyard Brains 2018 Summer Research Fellowship is coming to a close, but not before we get some real-world scientific experience in! Our research fellows are nearing the end of their residency at the Backyard Brains lab, and they are about to begin their tenure as neuroscience advocates and Backyard Brains ambassadors. The fellows dropped in […]

Strange to be introducing a new project on my conclusion post, but it’s a cool one! While waiting for pea plant project parts to arrive, I revisited another project that Monica Gagliano had done with the Mimosa pudica: https://youtu.be/Xm5i53eiMkU?t=2m45s. For those of you too impatient to watch a video (like me!) the Mimosa pudica is a […]

Welcome! This is Kylie Smith, a Michigan State University undergraduate writing to you from a basement in Ann Arbor. I am studying behavioral neuroscience and cognition at MSU and have been fortunate enough to have landed an internship with the one and only Backyard Brains for the summer. I am working on The Consciousness Detector […]

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 […]

Hey! What’s up? My name is Trevor Smith, currently a senior at the fabulous Michigan State University, and I am lucky enough to be participating in an internship at Backyard Brains this summer. I am currently working on pheromone detection in moth antennae, specifically how sensitive male moths antennae are to the female pheromone used […]

What follows is a tale of customs adventures, personal legal status in a foreign country, and the history of Serbia and Yugoslavia. We have had the grace to work in Serba a number of times over the past few years, and 2024 was no different. During July, we were invited by the Center for the […]

— Written by Tim Marzullo — Over the past 80 years, we have exploited the invention of computers to make calculations much faster than our human brains can. From the ENIAC machines of post-WWII predicting ballistic trajectories to the contemporary Google Colab notebooks we now use that process our team’s electrophysiology data in the cloud, we […]

Editor’s note: This is Part II. You can read Part I here. Danae Hello, I am Danae Madariaga, a senior at Alberto Blest Gana high school. I have participated in a data collection project with Etienne, Tim, and Derek for three months. Throughout this time, I have learned many things such as the use of Google Colab […]

— Written by Tim Marzullo — All vertebrate animals have hearts (and many invertebrates too), and many have EKGs that can be non-invasively recorded as commonly done in humans. We have fairly hairless bodies, so we can easily put sticker electrodes on our wrists or chests to record our EKG.  However, many of us share our households […]

—Post written by Sarah Falkovic— Can TinyML be used to design a small-scale lie detector model? Lie detection has been a field of interest for about as long as the field of neuroscience itself, if not longer! However, lie detection in our current culture involves administration by a trained professional in the form of a polygraph. While […]