We brought the prototype to SfN; Stefan brought the special flies. Here at Backyard Brains we believe in real-time posters, so if you came by, you would seen us explaining how the prototype worked while Stefan was busy preparing the fruitfly larva for recording. Below Nature reporter Ewen Callaway talks to Stefan as he tries to use our micro-rig.

Ewen subsequently wrote a nice blog post on our gear for the Nature News site, but the best treat of all for us was returning to “Neuropod,” the Nature Neuroscience podcast. We were on the podcast three years ago when we first tried to present our gear and nothing worked. But we kept hacking away, and now, with all our gear fully operational, we were happy to bring the first spikes recorded live on Neuropod!

As astute listener may wonder why you only hear the standard cockroach leg spikes on the podcast. Where are the fruitfly muscle recordings? Weren’t we also talking about some optogenetic device? Show the data! We admit, it was still relatively early in the day when we spoke with Ewen, and Stefan was still trying to get his dissection right (he remarked the monocular microscope made the dissection difficult, and he would have preferred the gooseneck dissection lights to be longer. Noted for Gen4). But Stefan stayed focused, and at 2 PM Sunday afternoon we successfully recorded the critical piece of data: the electromyogram from the fruitfly muscle during presentation of blue light. It’s noisy, but in the recording below you can hear the increased activity from the muscle at ~2 seconds when Stefan turned on the blue light. The blue light caused the cholinergic motor neurons to depolarize, resulting in muscle contraction.

Expect us to release the designs for the micromanipulator (you could 3D print it yourself!) and LED control circuit in a month or so.

It was a busy SfN for us, as we also ran a symposium on “Low Cost Neuroscience” with our colleagues Bruce Johnson from Cornell, Jeff Wilson from Albion, a high school teacher from the D.C. area, Raddy Ramos from New York Institute of Technology, our friend Stefan, and our keynote speaker Ben Robbins, a 6th grader from Novi Meadows Middle School. Mr. Robbins taught the audience how to successfully do outreach to 5th graders. We don’t have access to age data of presenters at SfN, but we would venture to guess Mr. Robbins may have been the youngest presenter ever for the society.

Scientists, with their huge intellect and famous experiments, can sometimes be intimidating to approach. Thus, we were a bit cautious and sheepish when we asked Mr. Robbins if he would let us take a picture with him. Thankfully, he was cool with it.

Photo by Jeff Wilson

You can watch Mr. Robbins’ talk below in all its lo-fi hand held camera glory. Don’t worry, the shaking slows down about 20 seconds in.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Our good friend Moheb Costandi also wrote a detailed summary of the symposium for the Dana Foundation. Stay tuned in the months to come as we release more inventions!

This operation has been a labor of love for us (working out of our living rooms and mother-in-law’s basement), and after 2.5 years of plugging away, we announce we are now ready to expand our team. We were recently awarded an NIMH SBIR grant: “Bringing Neurophysiology into Secondary Schools” to allow us to professionalize all our educational materials as well as build some new prototypes. We are currently recruiting to add a software developer and educator to our team. We thank the U.S. National Government for believing in our mission, and, of course, you the taxpayer!

And we want to thank you with more than a kind word. For the summer, we announce our first sale. The SpikerBox and Bag of Parts prices have now been lowered 10% to get neurophysiology into the hands of more and more people. We shall keep experimenting with production techniques to continue making neuroscience inquiry as affordable as possible.

To the NeuroRevolution!

-Tim & Greg

So where on this great planet have all these 266 little SpikerBoxes gone? We introduce our interactive SpikerMap. University professors are orange, graduate students are brown, amateur scientists are yellow, and our high school teachers are green. Some SpikerBoxes have even found their way to Alaska, South Korea, Germany, Holland, France, and England.

Note: We are aware that Pittsburgh is not in Wisconsin. During Thanksgiving, Professor Doug Weber single- handedly formed a satellite neural engineering department at his nephew’s house. You might also ask: Where is the first ever production SpikerBox that began this adventure? It’s owned and used by the hip graduate students of the University of California – San Diego Neuroscience Program.

As the SpikerBoxes have made their way around the world, we have been continually developing and improving the design. Since sales first began in April 2010, we have released four iterations of the SpikerBox. Here is what the current SpikerBox looks like (note the stylishacornnuts and acrylic housing).

We thank all the customers who have maintained and supported our dream of low cost electrophysiology for all.

We also recently returned from the Society for Neuroscience conference in San Diego (full post coming soon as we round up the pictures), and we give thanks for the Society for sponsoring our trip through the Next Generation Award,and to the Journal Neuron, which also sponsored us through the Anuradha Rao Memorial Travel Award. We’re working hard; thanks true believers!

The two local photographers, Justin Trupiano and Michael Shuster, and their models, were doing some contract work for a popular outdoor sportsware shop on State Street. We at Backyard Brains believe in taking advantage of unexpected opportunities, so we kindly asked the models and photographers if they would be willing to shoot a few pro bono shots with our gadgets and insects, in the spirit of helping a small Ann Arbor start-up (us). Quite cheerfully, they agreed! Thanks Justin and Mike! Below are the high quality beautiful photos. Feel the effect of the marketing. If you buy a SpikerBox, you can be like, and hang out with, people like this, the Salt of the Earth, Southeastern Michigan.

The cercal system is sensitive to vibration (wind, sound) and is a classical favorite of invertebrate physiologists; the anatomy of the sensory neurons’ projections to the terminal abdominal ganglion are well understood.

But can we record from the neural fibers of the cercal system with only the SpikerBox? If you place one electrode needle at the base of the cercus, and one electrode needle in the body as ground, like this:

and touch or blow on the cerci, you get a response like this (below is mp3,wav file can be downloaded here]:

Thanks for sharing the data Walton!

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.

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