• BYB World Neuro Tour Part III – from Patagonia up north the Panamericana
    Education
    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 […]
  • Spikes on a Plane Revisited
    Uncategorized
    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 our […]
  • Education
    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, […]
  • The 2017 Summer Fellowship Concludes
    Education
    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, […]
  • [Summer’16 Internship] Neuroscience of Grasshopper Jumps: Experimental Setup & Data Collection Begins!
    Education
    • July 6, 2016
    • by Greg
    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 […]
  • Backyard Brains Open House: Ann Arbor Tech Trek
    Education
    This Friday 3pm – 7pm, Backyard Brains will be hosting an open house as part of this year’s A2 Tech Trek! This is a fun, annual event which coordinates open houses at dozens of local tech companies. This event showcases the vibrant tech company and startup community in Ann Arbor and is a chance for […]
  • Leadership Initiatives Youth Development Program Features a Week Dedicated to Neuroscience!
    Education
    The Leadership Initiatives Advanced Medical Neuroscience Summit is a program that’s available for rising freshmen in high school to rising freshmen in college that gives students the opportunity to live for a short time at a college campus (Gorgeous Georgetown), attend lectures and learn from neuroscience professors, tour high-tech labs, and perform hands-on research. This […]
  • Make Music with your Muscles
    Education
    • January 16, 2019
    • by Greg
    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 that […]
  • Neural Interfaces Desde Santiago Hasta Oaxaca to Ann Arbor
    Education
    In March 2014 we went to Mexico’s first Maker Faire, invited by Amor Muñoz, a Mexican Textile and Electronic artist, who we met at Chile’s Santiago MakerFaire in November 2013. The Mexico MakerFaire took place in Oaxaca, a place known for traditional crafts, pero ahora se esta transformando en un lugar de “Nuevos-Makers” de diseño, […]
  • Welcome 2017 Backyard Brains Fellows!
    Education
    It’s early on a warm Ann Arbor morning and the office is buzzing with excitement! Our Summer 2017 research fellows are here! Today, our fellows are getting to know the staff and space at Backyard Brains, but more importantly, they’re planning, because for the next ten weeks they will be working on neuroscience and engineering […]
  • Though She Be But Little, She Can Hack
    Education
    What did you do with your weekends when you were 10 years old? We bet it wasn’t participate in a women-driven hackathon where you developed your own functioning neural robot! (We bet you wish you did, though.) Arushi Nath, age 10, recently participated in Elle Hacks 2020, an all-women hackathon hosted by York University […]
  • Are you fast enough to catch a grasshopper? Our new experiment and publication look for answers in visual neurons!
    Education
    Are you fast enough to catch a grasshopper with your bare hands? Might be tricky, because grasshoppers are quick to react to potential threats! This reaction time is thanks to a very specific, visual neural circuit in the grasshopper. By recording from this circuit in a living grasshopper prep, we can record the spikes that […]