Backyard Brains is live from inside the classroom of Colegio Alberto Blest Gana in Santiago to present you 5 group projects brought to life by creative and passionate students. and the methodology we used to choose the projects. This high school has been like a second lab for Backyard Brains, where the students beta test […]

Engage your students with even more Real-World Science PLTW is a powerhouse in the STEM Ed movement. Thanks to them, many schools are offering courses in Engineering, Computer Science, and, most exciting to us at BYB, Biomedical Sciences. Thanks to these courses, students have the opportunity to learn about all sorts of incredible career and research […]

As I was doing this project, the specter waiting for me as we started wrapping up our projects was the prospect of having to answer the question, “So what?” What is the point of this research? I spent most of my time working on the “methods,” the techniques (surgeries, soldering, coding) that became the experimental […]

Hello, everyone! Welcome back to the last installment of silkmoth updates. Things are starting to wrap up here this summer, and I’ve begun to analyze the data I have been collecting. Behavioral Data Analysis Last post, I explained the behavior assay that I am using with the moths to demonstrate how the sex pheromone bombykol can alter […]

Hello, everyone! It’s Jess again. Since I last wrote, I have shifted all my work from cockroaches over to silk moths. I’ve had to make a few modifications to my protocols, but overall the transition has been smooth. Working with the silk moths has been far more enjoyable than the cockroaches (no offense roaches, but […]

This post comes to you from our friends at Biomakespace! They are biohackers and electrophysiology enthusiasts who work and hack with our kits along with inventions of their own! They recently presented and demoed their cool tech at the annual Cambridge Sci  ence Festival in Massachusetts. We asked them a couple questions about the event […]

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, […]

Welp, it’s my last day of work here at Backyard Brains! It’s been a fun 11 weeks with my fellow interns, but all things must end. Last week we wrapped up all the TED filming for our mini series episodes. I had a great time, and I’m really looking forward to seeing the final result.  The […]

Ph.D. student and friend of Backyard Brains, Brinnae Bent of Duke University, recently hosted a class for seniors participating in the “Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Duke (OLLI at Duke).” With help from some colleagues at North Carolina State University, she put on an afternoon workshop in Electrophysiology for these lifelong learners. From its website, “OLLI […]

About Me Hi everyone, I’m Jaimie. I just graduated from Boston’s Northeastern University in Behavioral Neuroscience. My academic background is in biology, but I picked up some engineering and coding skills through previous lab research. Originally I’m from the Chicago area, so I’m pretty familiar with the Midwest atmosphere, though I had never been to Ann […]

As part of our operations, we give talks to the public on weekly basis. We begin with neural signals from the legs of cockroaches, display of which carries low risk as the legs can grow back and cockroach leg neural signals are not covered under United States Privacy laws. But, as we have been expanding our […]