Backyard Brains » Education

How to Troubleshoot Noise! on your SpikerBox

Tim — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 02:21:00 +0000

Blast you noise! Where do you come from! What do you want! Leave me alone! Sadly, to the neuroscientist, and indeed every scientist, noise is just a part of the natural world. But, since it is of the natural world, you can try to understand it, perhaps even reduce its effect on the phenomena you are studying. Backyard Brains hereby brings a high-production video straight from our lab in the North Suburbs of Ann Arbor. You’ll probably find our suggestions only kinda work for you. Welcome to Neuroscience!

Yes, Virginia, cockroach legs do grow back.

Tim — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 17:39:07 +0000

Many people have asked us if the cockroach legs we cut off and use for our experiments grow back on the respective owners. That and “the cockroach leg is still alive when removed from the body?” are the two most common questions we get, from 5 year olds up to 80 year olds.

After a cockroach donates 1-2 of its legs to science, he/she retired to the shady acres retirement home, where it spends the rest of its cockroach life living in dirt, making babies, and eating organic lettuce and carrots. When cleaning the terrarium, we often check to see if any of the legs have grown back.

Look what we discovered! The cockroach below went through two molts after his right rear leg was cut off. He just recently molted and we saw a little leg! The other leg (left rear) was cut in between the first and second molt. So, Yes, Virginia, they do grow back. Just takes two molts for the growing leg to appear. This cockroach is fine; he is back in his house eating lettuce.

Let a thousand neurons fire

Tim — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 19:35:32 +0000

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!

ByB visits MAKE magazine, Exploratorium

Tim — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 15:28:30 +0000

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…

RoboRoach Project Underway

Greg — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 18:30:11 +0000

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!

DIY Cockroach Water Dispenser

Greg — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 22:07:46 +0000

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.

ByB Concludes Ivy League Visits, Celebrates Cricket Cigarettes

Tim — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 15:24:01 +0000

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.

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

Tim — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 15:09:04 +0000

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.

ByB brings Spikes to the Society for Neuroscience

Tim — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 20:23:04 +0000

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!

ByB teaches Undergraduate and Graduate Students about Neurons

Tim — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 14:27:30 +0000

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