Backyard Brains » Outreach

“Cerebros del patio trasero” visita a Tejas del Oeste y lleva potenciales de acción al desierto

Tim — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 21:08:51 +0000

We are proud to have run many workshops in the Midwest, but co-founder Tim has longed to bring spikes to the Texas plains he recalls from his early years (he graduated from high school in El Paso and went to college in Austin). Thus, it was with great delight when Emily Verla Bovino, artist-in-residence with Fieldwork: Marfa and graduate researcher at UC-San Diego, invited Backyard Brains to come down and help run a workshop at Marfa Independent High School, deep in West Texas. To those not in the know, West Texas has the least light pollution in the lower 48 states, is terrific for astronomical observation, and is the “kind of Texas” you’d imagine if you’ve never visited.

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photos by Backyard Brains

The Marfa High School visit ran over two days the week before Christmas. The school is rather small with a total enrollment of ~100 students, so in a marathon session facilitated by Emily and both the arts and physics teachers, Tim lectured to all four classes: Freshman at 8 AM, Sophomores at 9 AM, Juniors at 10 AM, and Seniors at 11 AM! He presented principles of neurotechnology interspersed with neural recording and stimulation experiments, closing with a brief discussion of entrepreneurship.

Following the lectures/demos on neuroscience, the workshop began in the afternoon, where with the organization of art teacher Ellie Meyer, the sixteen students of teacher Benjie Rosaldo’s Robotics Class learned about analog electronics and built their own SpikerBoxes. This took place over two afternoons, and after we identified and fixed the usual errors of shorts and the occasional incorrectly-placed resistors, we concluded with the cricket drug experiments and demo’s of the RoboRoach. Some of the students learning the art of ranching part-time, we noted the comfort level with the bugs was higher than other workshops we have run…

photos by Emily Verla Bovino

During the second day of the workshop, we also had a live radio interview along with students Zach Madrid and Eileen Cordova. You can listen to our interview with station manager Tom Michael on KRTS Marfa Public Radio below:

Notably, our spikes in the studio were transmitted live across the land! A running joke from our graduate school days, and even today, is the question we often receive: “Have you ever thought of making your [insert invention/technique here] wireless?” For example, a “wireless” SpikerBox would interface with a computer or smartphone without the need of a cable. We hereby announce that “Yes We Can. The SpikerBox can go wireless!” By hooking up the SpikerBox to Marfa Public Radio’s 5,000 Watt radio tower, Spikes were broadcast over 15,000 square miles to listeners in the West Texas desert. Contact us if you are interested in purchasing your own 5,000 Watt Radio Tower to accompany your SpikerBox, but be aware of certain FCC regulations

photo by Backyard Brains

During our stay in Marfa, Emily’s three month residency at Fieldwork: Marfa was at its end. Her artistic “fieldwork” involved research for an episode in the epic life-log of a fictional character that Emily calls the “hyperthymestic RK”. In the episode, the second of a never-ending series (contact her if you would like a screening of the first installment online at rk-log.net) the character RK travels to a heterotopian West Texas of the near future to participate as a human subject in clinical studies. Emphasis in these studies is on neural engineering, specifically optogenetics and nanorobotics. The scenario for episode two, a scenography and audio-drama which Emily is now in the process of editing, was presented at the local Honky Tonk Bar “Padre’s”, an initiative owned and run by the multihyphenate David Beebe. We ran some demos of spikes to set the scene for a story of unmanned border check points patrolled remotely with battling transgenic beetles and cockroaches engineered in neurotech land yacht flexlabs.

Photo by Backyard Brains

The whole visit was quite fruitful on both the art and science fronts, and we are exploring how to make our visit to West Texas a yearly Fall tradition. West Texas, with it’s unique geography and open skies, has an expansive effect on the mind that many brain-workers, including the cosmologists Donald Judd and Carl Sagan, have been attracted to. Thus, with Emily, we are brainstorming ways to begin a “Looking Outward, Look Inward” yearly fall workshop. West Texas already has the famous McDonald Observatory to understand the universe beyond, so why not also make the borderlands a place to understand the universe within?

Unique work spaces are abundant in West Texas and should appeal to the numerous DIYbio groups that have cropped up across the country in recent years. As the trip wound down, Emily arranged for Tim to run experiments in Padre’s vintage airstream land yacht on ranch land just a few miles west of the landmark Marfa eateries Mando’s and Alice’s Cafe. Though Tim didn’t get the chance to taste Mando’s chile rellenos or Alice’s huevos rancheros, he did eat a “Marfa burrito”, went hunting for “fragile cockroaches”on the banks of the Rio Grande and even got to debug student boards with unidentified circuit shorts in the airstream.

Stay tuned. ¡Bienvenidos al futuro! ¿Que descubrimientos de los picos, nos esperan en el porvenir?

Photo by Backyard Brains

Photo by Emily Verla Bovino

Acknowledgements: We thank the Burns Family, Marfa Studio for the Arts, Fieldwork: Marfa, The Marfa National Bank, and Padre’s Marfa for sponsorship and support.

Backyard Brains sells 500th SpikerBox, is awarded NIH Grant, and lowers prices for summer

Tim — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 19:53:04 +0000

We began distributing SpikerBoxes on April 8th, 2010, and we are proud to announce that on June 15th, 2011, we shipped our 500th SpikerBox! The proud owner is a high school teacher in Minnesota who ordered 12 “Bags of Parts” for students to build and experiment with this summer. You can see our complete user breakdown on our finance page and map. In short, of the 510 SpikerBoxes we have shipped to 183 unique customers, 218 have been preassembled by us, and 292 have been where users build the SpikerBox themselves.

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

“Circuits to Circuits II” workshop on June 24th. Teachers, sign up today!

Tim — Thu, 26 May 2011 19:40:24 +0000

It’s time for our second teacher workshop! In collaboration with the great folks at the SquareOne Education Network, we are hosting a teacher workshop on June 24th, 2011, whereby if you are a teacher within driving distance of the greater Detroit area, you can spend a day building your own SpikerBox amplifier and running experiments to take back to your classroom. You will also gain a wealth (the greatest wealth) of knowledge on how to do easy neuroscience with your students. Sign up is $25 and includes all the gear, materials, and lunch. To apply, fill out the very brief application and send to Barb Land at SquareOne! Space is limited (20 max), and yes, we do have SBCEU’s available! Welcome to the NeuroRevolution!

This workshop is subsidized by Backyard Brains, the SquareOne Network, and the Michigan Society for Neuroscience to give secondary school teachers access to tools to improve teaching about the brain. If you are a science professional (graduate student, professor, physician), you are welcome to come as well, but the fee is the normal $90 charge per attendee.

Date: Friday, June 24th at the Macomb Intermediate School District

Schedule:

8:30 – 8:45: Introductions

8:45 – 9:00: Brief lecture on electronics

9:00 – 10:00: SpikerBox Building Session I

10:00 – 10:30: Deeper Discussion on electronics

10:30 – 12:00: SpikerBox Building Continues

12:00 – 12:30: Lunch

12:30 – 1:15: SpikerBox Building Finish/ lecture on neuroscience

1:15 – 2:45: Experiments

2:45 – 3:30: Data Discussion/Feedback

Yes, this will make complete sense to you by the end of the day! Oh transistor, is there anything you cannot do?

Thanks to FundScience for Helping Us Sponsor an Optogenetics Design Project

Tim — Fri, 06 May 2011 18:32:09 +0000

Thanks to all who donated! The mission of FundScience is to get the public directly involved in funding scientific enterprise, so, of course, where did the $512.20 we raised actually go? Did it dump right into indirect costs? No way! Our organization develops low-cost neurotechnology, and the support of FundScience helped enable the building of an optogenetics prototype for a senior final design project we sponsored at the University of Michigan. What is optogenetics? It’s an exciting technology, developed in the early 2000′s, of stimulating neurons with light. The neurons in fruit flies and mice are modified using genetic engineering techniques, and the creatures have light-sensitive ion channels. It’s a rather useful technology (just ask any neuroscientist), but to date has only been available at advanced research institutions. But because of you, not anymore. We have made preliminary inroads towards making optogenetics a tool even high school students can use!

For our prototype to allow portable demonstrations of optogenetics in transgenic fruit flies, we needed a neuroamplifier, a micromanipulator, a microscope, and LED light controller. Backyard Brains has its own amplifier (the SpikerBox), and we decided to go with an off-the-shelf inexpensive microscope rather than design our own optics. Thus, our design efforts focused on the manipulator, the LED control, and the biological preparation. We worked with five seniors in biomedical engineering (Emily, Zack, Nick, John, and Sharon, all from Southeastern Michigan) over about 12 weeks. We are happy to report we were successful in building a functional prototype that we then tested with scientist Stefan Pulver of Cornell University/University of Cambridge.Here is a picture of the prototype.

On April 17th, we successfully recorded EMG’s (electromyograms) from channelrhodopsin-2 expressing fruit flies using the prototype we built. These flies have ChR expressed in their glutamatergic neurons, and when blue light is flashed upon them, the muscles in their body wall contract. Using the manipulator to place the electrode on the exposed muscle, the microscope to view the dissection, the amplifier to record EMGs, and the LED controller to flash light, we had a fully contained optogenetics rig. Below you can listen to an audio recording of light-evoked EMG. It’s noisy, but you can hear the response!

Here are the students posing with their invention!

For our second prototype, which we are currently working on, we will increase the stability of the manipulator by combining the y and x-axis with the z-axis of the manipulator. We also need to improve the iPhone application that controls the LED. The biggest weakness of our design is more biological than mechanical; the Drosophila dissection takes expertise to do well. Once the stability improves, we will begin demoing this unit to high schools. We have actually already begun demonstrations of the behavioral responses of transgenic fruit flies to blue light. See below for some investigation by students at Winans Academy in Detroit.

We thank all the donators who contributed to this project, the hard working senior design students, and our colleague Stefan Pulver for providing the fruit flies, time, and expertise. We are bootstrapping the continued development; the work continues! Below is the exact cost breakdown of the use of the funds.

fiat scientia: bringing spikes to the Society of Neuroscience and Eric Kandel

Tim — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 00:08:38 +0000

The annual Society for Neuroscience meeting is a big event for us; we prepare all year working on new prototypes and experiments for annual review by our colleagues, friends, and academic foes. This year was a special treat, as we were recognized for our outreach efforts by the Society itself, represented by President Michael Goldburg.

The highlight of this conference for us, of indeed all the conferences we’ve been to, was meeting the second most famous Neuroscientist ever. Yes, none other than Nobel LaureateEric Kandel. When we saw him at the beginning of the Presidential lecture, making rounds and shaking hands with the other famous neuroscientists, we snuck up behind him and slowly turned up the speaker on our SpikerBox. When he turned around, we said,”Sorry to interrupt you, Professor Kandel, but we were just wondering if you’ve ever seen neurons before.” He didn’t skip a beat; he saw the real-time spikes on the iPad, and said “My, those are beautiful! Spikes at Neuroscience! You’re the ones who should be giving the presidential lecture!” He touched the cockroach leg to see if he could evoke a neural response, and he was convinced. We then sat down. Thanks Professor! We’ll keep working hard! Props also to Jeff Nyveen, photographer for the meeting, for quickly grabbing the shots for us.

SpikerBox Make and Take Workshop

Greg — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 17:06:00 +0000

We’ve often been told “I’d love to make a SpikerBox kit, but I can’t solder!” Well, if you live near the Backyard Brains World Headquarters (a living room in Ann Arbor, MI) you are in luck. We are putting on a “Make and Take” workshop on Sunday, December 5th.

This workshop will teach you everything you need to know to build, solder, and assemble your very own SpikerBox. Once completed, we will run some experiments so you can record spikes on your very own creation.

Spots are limited. More information is available online. Hope to see you there!

Microstimulation Experiment: Yes, you can excite the leg with your phone

Tim — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 03:16:56 +0000

Another common request we get from users is “Can you stimulate the leg as well?” to which we have always replied, “Yes, there are some stimulation circuits we can build, we have that idea in the queue.” Which means, of course, that the idea is relegated to the backlog of the many cool things we can work on given our limited resources, which by extension means the prototype development will be awhile.

But happily, we realized were overthinking it! It turns out the output of headphone jack on a computer/iPhone is1.3 V, with a maximum output of 750 A. Tim seems to recall (shameless self-promotion) from his graduate work that those voltage/current levels are well above the requirements to excite muscle and nervous system tissue. Fellow colleagues, we now present, to our growing video lab, how to do your own microstimulation experiment!

Recording from Cricket Cercal Ganglia

Tim — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 14:50:20 +0000

Does the SpikerBox work on anything other than a cockroach leg? Yes, you can record from any invertebrate central nervous system but you often need a manipulator to accurately position your electrode. One of our users, Professor Walton Jones at the KAIST University in South Korea, recently experimented on the cricket cercel system. To those of you stuck in the mammal world (we were there too, we understand), the cerci are sensory organs on the rear of crickets and other insects (including cockroaches).

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!

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

Tim — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 17:31:45 +0000

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.

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 tocontact us!