Backyard Brains featured on Boing Boing, Boston Globe, and Nature.com

We have received a fair bit of press the past week related to some of the community events we have done. In June Tim spoke at the Humanity Plus Summit at Harvard on the “Rise of the Citizen Scientist.” The room was jam-packed with “trans-humanists” and Tim was interviewed for a Boston Globe piece on the open science movement.

At the recent MAKER faire in Detroit, editor-in-chief of MAKE Magazine, Mark Frauenfelder, selected us as his favorite Makers on Boing-Boing. Thanks Mark! See below for some budding neuroscientists.

Finally, we are collaborating with the Fund Science folks, to allow you, yes you, to contribute to research projects. Wonder when you do those 5K runs for cancer, where the money goes? Here you directly know. Donations to Backyard Brains would go towards paying educators to help develop our lab books and hiring coders to improve and update our iPhone/iPad educational software. A recent article in nature.com speaks about this funky new concept. Don’t worry, rest assured we at Backyard Brains are decidedly poor (not paying ourselves yet); you’re not donating to a company like AIG, which you already did, in a round-about way.

Posted: 2010-Aug-4 — Filed under: Biz, Marketing, Outreach

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

Spikes on a Plane!

Flying back from a successful trip from California, Tim and Greg of Backyard had decided there was time for one more experiment…

Thanks to the kind TSA folks at the San Francisco International Airport and Delta airlines, we were able to record spikes in flight. Quite possibly the first neurons ever recorded on a commercial airline!

With the exception of one dissenting voice, the passengers on board were a great audience.  By coincidence, the person sitting in the seat next to Tim and Greg was a neuroscientist from Britain!  He helped design our working hypothesis for the experiment:  spikes will fire less with decreased O2 pressure in the cabin.  Here are some of the photos from the historic flight.

The stow-aways take in the scenery of California from 37,000 feet.

Remember when doing surgery, to keep the operating room well lit.

Our flight attendant was gracious enough to loan us anaesthesia in the form of a cup of ice and a Coke Zero (and a bag a peanuts).

Fellow passengers were given a science lesson while roaming the fuselage or waiting for the restrooms

While we failed to determine if decreased air pressure changed the spiking rate of insects, we determined that the overall experiment was a big success!

Posted: 2010-Mar-30 — Filed under: Outreach — Tags: , ,