• Spiker (Wo)Men & Knitted Bugs: Backyard Brains at SfN 2024
    Outreach
    There’s always a good deal of creativity, laughter and general joie de vivre at our booth, but this year’s SfN (Society for Neuroscience) conference got another layer of novelty: knitted bugs and brains in wheelbarrows. If you’re thinking that we’ve started making 3D knitted swag, you’re in the wrong. These were in fact gifted to […]
  • Brain Awareness Week Grants Are Back – Get Up to $1,250 for 2025!
    Outreach
    Calls for applications for 2025 Brain Awareness Week are out! Apply by 31st October to get up to $1,250 towards your BAW event that will highlight the importance of neuroscience for our societies. As you may know already, Brain Awareness Week takes place mid-March annually in just about every corner of the planet. In 2025, […]
  • Backyard Brains in Vienna: FENS 2024 Neuroscience Conference Recap
    Outreach
    — Written by Jelena Ciric — This summer, we didn’t take a spin on the world’s oldest Ferris wheel that’s still in use. (Late June was just too hot for that.) Nor did we manage to take a bite of Sacher Cake or Viennese Schnitzel famous the world over. So what did we do in […]
  • New Edition of
    Outreach
    Schools, museums, libraries, community centers and other public venues in over 75 countries— last week, the entire planet was firing spikes in honor of the brain during Brain Awareness Week 2024! An annual event organized and partly funded by Dana Foundation and International Brain Research Organization (IBRO), it’s the biggest joint scientific outreach in the […]
  • Our New Book
    Education
    We almost ran out of pens at the world’s biggest neuroscience conference! This year’s Society for Neuroscience (SfN) was the first in-person meeting since 2019. And we’re really happy that it happened. Firstly, we’ve so missed the nerdy vibes of sci-comm bustle. Secondly, taking a stroll under palms in sunny San Diego feels really nice […]
  • Backyard Brains at FENS 2022 - Neuroscience in the City of Light
    Education
    — Written by Jelena Ciric — This summer’s been a busy and buzzy season for spreading the word on DIY neuroscience! As part of the outreach activities, our crew hit Paris to attend FENS (Forum of European Neuroscience), Europe’s largest international neuroscience conference. We set up shop there and demoed the latest upgrades of our […]
  • A Poem on Love and Neurotransmitters
    Education
    It takes a practiced hand to be able to take complex, abstract ideas, and describe them in simple ways. In many ways, this is the job of educators. We take it upon ourselves to grapple with abstractions and find novel connections, comparisons, and metaphors to help others understand a new idea. Brod Bagert, who we […]
  • Hopped The Pond for FENS 2018
    Education
    The Open Hardware Symposium and our Exhibit Generated Excitement, Smiles, and Inspiration Every year, Backyard Brains reaches farther and farther with our quest to spread DIY neuroscience, and this year, we hopped the pond to the largest neuroscience conference in Europe! Our experiments were a hit at the Forum of European Neuroscience (FENS) held in Berlin, […]