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 […]

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 […]

But Why Plants? With the Introduction of the The Plant SpikerBox, you can, for the first time ever, explore plant behavior and electrophysiology at home or in the classroom. But wait…. Plants? Why are neuroscientists interested in… plants…? When we work with young students, we often begin by asking them “What has a brain?” You get your typical responses, […]

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 […]

–Written by Sarah Falkovic– Welcome to the update on my lie detector project! In my previous blog post, I discussed the modality of electrodermal activity, a.k.a our unconscious sweat response and its ties to stress. However, as a method of measuring lies it leaves much to be desired due to its ability to be swayed […]

— 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 […]

***Written by Sofia Eisenbeiser*** Ever had this feeling that fish in your aquarium are having a blast?  This summer I am working with a few of them to determine whether or not they exhibit play behaviors.   This study began as a simple replication of Dr. Gordon Burghardt’s 2014 publication, which found that three white-spotted African cichlid fish […]

Introduction to the project … Hi, everyone! Last week marked the halfway point of my time as a fellow here at Backyard Brains!  Recently, I’ve succeeded in building a rig and recording video footage of my Squid Hatchlings! I’m excited because it means I can start gathering quantifiable data! The squiddos have kept me pretty busy during these […]

Hello, everyone! Jess here. Lots of exciting things have happened in the last two weeks. First, I have begun to raise a group of silkworms into moths (#mothmom). This involves feeding them Mulberry leaves from my backyard each day, keeping everything extremely clean and crossing my fingers in hopes that I know what I’m doing. […]

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 […]

  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 […]

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 […]