Let a thousand neurons fire

On July 20th and 21st, Backyard Brains ran part of the Health and Biomedical Engineering for Girls Camp, where, over the course of two days, 45 area high school girls learned about electronics and neuroscience. They built and soldered their own SpikerBoxes, and then used their new devices for their own neuroscience experiments. See below for a wonderful sight of brand new neuroscientists brought into existence! Watch out oh professors of the world, in 5-7 seven years you might be seeing some unusually talented graduate students.

If you are interested in Backyard Brains coming to your student group and teaching about neurons and electrical engineering, don’t hesitate to contact us!

Posted: 2010-Jul-30 — Filed under: Education, Marketing, Outreach

ByB visits MAKE magazine, Exploratorium

Backyard Brains just returned from a packed trip to the Bay Area, where, among other things, the highlights included meeting the folks at MAKE Magazine. The night before our morning meeting, we were up late in the hotel making sure everything worked.

Thankfully, everything was fully operational battle station, and we spent a good two and a half hours at the editorial offices, doing demos for the staff. Dale Dougherty, the editor and publisher, got to hear his first neuron!

We also browsed their workshop and saw some of the gear that may be familiar to readers of MAKE.

During the weekend, Tim went to the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park and finally saw some Giant Cockroaches. Oddly, they look simply like giant versions of the Discoid Cockroaches that Backyard Brains uses.

On the last day of the trip, ByB also visited the Exploratorium and had a great chat with Charlie Carlson, senior Biologist. He told us the Exploratorium used to do neurophysiology in the 70’s, but phased it out for new exhibits. Tim and Greg were disheartened, but Charlie explained that he’d love to bring it back, and the introduction of inexpensive, easy-to-use neuroscience (they were using $1000 rigs even in the 70’s) is right in line with the Exploratorium’s mission. To the beginning of a beautiful friendship…

Posted: 2010-Mar-15 — Filed under: Education, Marketing

RoboRoach Project Underway

Read an interview with UM senior Ahmed Suhaib that appeared in today’s issue of the Michigan Daily discussing Backyard Brain’s collaboration with the Biomedical Engineering Design Program to help design our RoboRoach.

Stay tuned, as we work to bring you this and other exciting products in the near future!

Posted: 2010-Feb-15 — Filed under: Education

DIY Cockroach Water Dispenser

Tired of having to dampen those sponges, and adding fresh potatoes for your cockroaches during these dry winter months?  Well, this may be the solution for you. Here’s what you’ll need:

• Twine (We borrowed some from Colin Stoetzner’s science video art project)
• Shampoo/Mouthwash sampler bottle
• Pair of Scissors
• Cockroaches (Optional)

Simply poke a hole in the top of the bottle, thread the twine through, fill with water, and voilà! You have yourself a self-feeding water bottle! The twine will continually be moist, allowing your little friends to drink during the cover of night.

Special thanks to Karen Coulter for giving ByB this tip from her days studying cockraoches for the RHex Robot Project.

Posted: 2010-Jan-13 — Filed under: Education — Tags: Care and Handeling, Cockroach

ByB Concludes Ivy League Visits, Celebrates Cricket Cigarettes

ByB is back in Ann Arbor after a 1600 mile road trip to Boston and Ithaca to visit Harvard and Cornell. Our guest lecture for Professor Murthy’s neuroscience course went very well; in a first for ByB, the cigarette gatorade cricket ganglion experiment definitively worked! Too bad we weren’t recording the data. Tim put a cricket on wax underneath a microscope, exposed the ganglion, positioned the ganglionizer micromanipulator prototype into position, hooked the bipolar electrodes to the SpikerBox, and heard evoked spikes (from blowing on the Cerci)!!!

Then, Greg took a cigarette (Natural Sherman Unfiltered), put it in a bottle of gatorade, shook it up, and Tim then aliquoted this potent mixture onto the exposed ganglia. And to the delight of everyone in the class, the ganglion neurons increased their firing rate and we even heard some neurons dying (baaaarrrrrraaaaaaaaa…you all know what it sounds like)! Nicotine affects Acetylcholine receptors? Who knew?

Some photos from our trip:

We also visited Michael Fee’s lab at MIT, on the way teaching folks on the subway about neurons:

On the way back to Ann Arbor, Tim stopped by Cornell to visit the pioneers of inexpensive Neurophysiology: The CRAWDAD group. Tim felt at home in the beautiful campus and Mudd Hall, where the magic happens and neurobiology is king.

Tim also met local neuroelectronics guru Bruce Land, who offered some helpful tips on amplifiers. “Remember what you did 10 years ago? We are trying to do the same thing.” He gave us his best wishes.

Posted: 2009-Dec-1 — Filed under: Education

ByB to Guest Lecture at Harvard this Friday 2 PM, Sever Hall, Room 202

If you are in the Boston Area this week, come by Sever Hall, Room 202, at 2 PM this Friday the 20th, for a special lecture by ByB at the Neuroscience Course taught by Professor Venkatesh Murthy. Hecklers welcome, electronics heads even more (survey: what’s your favorite single-ended instrumentation amp?) Hope to see you there!

And yes, we will be driving Bopper.

Posted: 2009-Nov-16 — Filed under: Education

ByB brings Spikes to the Society for Neuroscience

Backyard Brains recently spent five days in Chicago for the Society for Neuroscience conference, which is the primo place to be to show off your latest discoveries on the workings of the mysterious brain. 30,000 people! and ByB is proud to say they were probably the first poster presenters since the annual meeting began in 1971 to do actual recordings at the conference! We brought a veritable lab to our exhibit.

And quite the crowd came to see Greg demonstrate our prototypes

And, via our newest collaborator and colleague Alex Wiltschko, we officially announced a new iPhone app for recording spikes! Now you don’t even need a computer to do your neuroscience. See Greg showing it off below..

The official Spanish speaking liaison of Backyard Brains, Mrs. Jennifer Trigger Marzullo, talked about the SpikerBox to some of our fellow Neuroscientists from Mexico and Argentina. “¡Lo hacemos en el garaje!”

Backyard Brains was also proud to announce its first sale! Gina Poe, faculty member at the University of Michigan and a thesis committee member from Tim’s PhD dissertation, gave us a down payment on the first SpikerBox. Thanks Gina! We’re on it!

Of course, with so many of our hero neuroscientists present, Backyard Brains recruited hard. We tried unsuccessfully to convince George Paxinos, author of famed Rat Atlas in Sterotaxic Coordinates, to make a new book on the cockroach. He was kind enough, though, to let us take a picture with him.

And, to Tim’s delight, ByB ran into Eberhard Fetz. One could quite easily argue Tim’s whole PhD Dissertation was based on work done by Professor Fetz. Operant Conditioning of Unit Activity? Done in 1969, better than you. Investigation of LFPs and spikes in Motor Cortex? Done in 1996, better than you. Simultaneous Recording and Stimulation for Closed-Loop Control? Done in 2008, better than you. Even Backyard Brain’s new use of a smartphone as a data acquisition device? Done in 2006, better than you.

But, with a huge smile and a sigh of relief on our parts, Professor Fetz liked the SpikerBox and iPhone app and gave us a thumbs up. Keep us sharp Eb!

Now back to work and getting to production!

Posted: 2009-Oct-22 — Filed under: Education, Marketing

ByB teaches Undergraduate and Graduate Students about Neurons

Tim recently taught the Neurophysiology Section of a Biomedical Engineering Course, “Quatitative Physiology,”  at the University. Notably, this was the first time ByB did its cricket ganglia nicotine experiment in a public setting. Did it work? Maybe…the smooth metal of the desk table made the manipulator very slippery with its brick support, and holding onto the neuron proved challenging. But you can listen for yourself! Below are links to the five lectures (each 30-50 minutes long) you may enjoy as an intro to neural engineering. The cricket experiment is at the beginning of lecture 5; you can notice from Tim’s initial “Uh” interludes that doing a tough experiment while narrating can be a bit challenging at first

Lecture 1: Neural Recording

Lecture 2: Neural Data Analysis

Lecture 3: Manipulating the Brain

Lecture 4: The Electrode Problem

Lecture 5: NeuroProsthetics

Posted: 2009-Sep-30 — Filed under: Education

Girls in Science and Engineering Summer Camp

Backyard brains was pleased to participate in the Health and Biomedical Sciences Summer Camp put on by UofM’s Women in Science and Engineering organization.  The H&BS camp was a week-long set of activities with the goal of giving high school students hands-on experience in different health science related fields, and to broaden their perspectives about what health careers include (beyond/in addition to med school).

We received excellent feedback from the students, and we look forward to teaching more classes in the future. Stay tuned.

Posted: 2009-Jul-29 — Filed under: Education — Tags: K-12, Outreach, WISE

New Cockroach Species Arrives

We currently have used American Cockroaches (Periplaneta americana) in our experiments, but we have to order them from Carolina Biological Supply in North Carolina, and they are a bit expensive due to live animal shipping charges. No angst towards that fantastic company, but we have been looking for a local supplier that can give us cockroaches at reduced cost. Fear not! Pet Supplies Plus, within walking distance of our labs and workshops can provide us Discoid Cockroaches (Blaberus discoidalis) at ~$10/dozen! I picked some up last week, they are actually rather cute and look like giant roly-polys. Guess we’ll have some company on our roadtrip to Kansas City to visit the Kauffman Foundation…

Posted: 2009-Jul-15 — Filed under: Education — Tags: biology, Cockroach, discoid