My name is Jake Robbins and I have been working behind the scenes here at Backyard Brains this summer as a lab tech. I recently graduated from Novi High School, and will be attending Michigan State University this fall. My job at Backyard Brains has mostly consisted of working on much of the software coding […]

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 […]

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 […]

Call for Undergraduates in Biology or Engineering Fields: Are you a neuroscience nerd? Do you want to learn how the brains of animals like squids or dragonflies work? Is your background in Electrical, Mechanical or Computer Engineering? Want to develop your own innovative experiments and publish your results? Learn to communicate those stunning results with 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 […]

Hello everyone. My name is Pranav Senthilkumar and I am a junior at Mission San Jose High School in Fremont, CA (SFO Bay Area) For my project at the Alameda County Science fair last year, I designed a neuroprosthetic device using the original SpikerBox and the Human Neuroprosthetic kit. What is a Neuroprosthetic, and how does […]

—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 […]

It can’t be avoided: the standards must be met! While we encourage educators everywhere to break free from the shackles of bureaucratic granularity in education… we also admit that education standards perform a necessary function. There are educational and developmental milestones that all students should achieve, and it is the goal of the standards to […]

— Written by Amanda Putti & Milica Milosevic — Well we made it! We’re at the final week of the BYB Fellowship! We faced many challenges throughout this project and had to pivot in order to get results, but we are happy where it ended. To give updates on our progress, let’s first start where we left […]

Donors Choose Neuroscience Donors Choose continues to be a fantastic option for teachers who are determined to get DIY neuroscience tools into their classrooms, despite declining departmental budgets. With its Kickstarter-like backing program, Donors Choose gives educators another option for providing classroom equipment for their students without breaking the bank–by relying on the kindness of their community. […]

  Hello again my faithful viewers, and thanks for tuning in for another exciting octopus themed blog post. As always I am your host Ilya Chugunov, but today I’ve come with sad news; all good things must come to an end, and this marks the end of my summer research here with Backyard Brains. Now’s a […]