New from Backyard Brains: An in-depth summer training experience to help bring NGSS-aligned neuroscience lessons into your classroom. Do you want to learn how the brains of animals like crawdads or praying mantises work? Do you want to develop your own innovative experiments to take back to your students? Would you like to learn to […]

Greetings, this is Trevor coming live from Ann Arbor in a basement…             We have one week left in the internship and things are finally starting to come together. Last time I made a post, I was without a doubt on the struggle bus in terms of getting data worthy of a poster, let alone a journal […]

Take it from Twitter: Low-cost EEG is a powerful teaching tool! As a business, it can be strange to package and ship off all these different neuroscience education tools, wondering if they’ll like their new home, will they make a difference in this big, strange world? Much like a proud parent, we are always excited […]

Grant Funded Science! Just a hop and a skip away from our home office in Ann Arbor Michigan, Biology teachers at Okemos High School requested and received grant funding to introduce several Human-Human-Interfaces into their classrooms. The results left their students stunned… “‘This feels so weird!’ was a common exclamation. Most students laughed during the experience. A few […]

Without superpowers or a power drill there are only a couple ways we can observe brain activity and most of them require large expensive equipment:                                                                     Luckily, with the help of Backyard Brains, you can make the equipment yourself! This summer, I’m going to be using such DIY equipment to do some electroencephalography (or EEG) experiments to study […]

Materials: check. Grasshoppers: Check. Protocol: Check, and please do check the instructions on the main project profile for the protocol of this experiment. Next step: Setting up the experiment and take off! This is how the grasshopper spends an hour of its time for science: The iPad screen is placed on the side contralateral (opposite) to where […]

In the project instructions, I’ve briefly talked about the BYB SpikeRecorder app that I’ve been using on an iPad to add to my grasshopper vision project the flavor of a low-cost-and-DIY-albeit-of-great-quality tool. Here, I’ll talk about it in a bit more details to give the spotlight to one of the main components of my project. Firstly, […]

Hi everyone! I’m Cristian, a junior at Nido de Aguilas High School in Chile. Aside from math and engineering, which are my main interests, I enjoy playing drums and reading nonfiction. During my internship here at Backyard Brains, I’ve been working on building a musical instrument! It is a modification of our Muscle SpikerShield […]

Over 11 sunny Ann Arbor weeks, our research fellows worked hard to answer their research questions. They developed novel methodologies, programmed complex computer vision and data processing systems, and compiled their experimental data for poster, and perhaps even journal, publication. But, alas and alack… all good things must come to an end. Fortunately, in research, […]

It’s ET again with some updates to the BYB World Neuro Tour. Arriving in Rio de Janeiro, my friend Geo and I travelled down the Atlantic coast to spread the word of Neuroscience (for details see: onneurotour.blogspot.com or here). In Montevideo we decided to buy a VW Kombi, named her ‘Brunhilde’, and wanted to find […]

In early March, Backyard Brains made history by doing the first neural recordings on a commercial airline flight. As professional scientists however, we know that experiments should be repeated before conclusions are made. On a flight from Chicago to Kansas City in late April, we again performed the experiment. Before that though, during […]

Last school year we worked with teachers across the country to help bring real, meaningful neuroscience lessons into their classrooms. From 5th grade to university, educators and students loved learning about how the brain works, how we study the brain, and how we engineer devices that can be controlled by the brain! One educator, in particular, […]