Blog has moved to Backyard Brains

Over the past six months, I have been devoting my attention to getting Backyard Brains off the ground. The majority of my online presence is now devoted to that site, and it has its own blog now in the news section. I typically update it every 1-2 weeks. MarzulloHead Queries is dissolved!

But, as a final note, I was recently married! Happy Days!

SpikerBox Pitch

My colleague Greg Gage and I are in the process of submitting grants so that we can transition Backyard Brains from prototype to production. See our video pitch for a grant we submitted today for the NCIIA (National Collegiate Inventors & Innovators Alliance) Advanced E-Team!

Backyard Brains Launched

All of my spare time the past few months has been devoted to getting the $100 spike operational as my colleague Greg Gage and I try to start up our company "Backyard Brains, Inc." Check us out! Accepting preorders soon!

Yes folks, we were playing, in real-time, spikes out of my car stereo last week trying to impress the folks on the sidewalk as we were cruising. It was quite fun, because when Greg would stick the prep out the window of the car, the wind stimulus would increase the spike rate!

Here is me showing the prototype to my Lab Manager (that is her hand holding the tweezers to tickle the leg barbs on the cockroach).

Yes, We got a Spike

My colleague Greg Gage has designed a rather nice amplifier for recording spikes from the cockroach leg, and we are now in the commercialization process. For validation and comparison purposes, I also built an amplifier based on previously published designs. Tonight, finally, after 10 years of neuroscience education, I recorded a spike in my home workshop. The El Camino feels neglected.

Bopper back on the road!

Hooray! I drove it out of the garage this morning after 7 months!

You can also see pictures of the assembly here.

Bringing Bicycles on Trains and Buses..the efficient way

I often find myself traveling, and I often find myself in need of a bicycle. I finally solved this problem by buying myself a folding bike a couple months ago, and I love it.

 But, the folks on the MegaBus won't let me bring a folding bike on their bus unless it is in a bag or a box. So... last weekend I went to an army surplus store in Chicago and bought a duffel bag that could hold the bike. It works, I can now comfortably carry it, but it does look a little funny.

Bringing Neuroscience to the Garage - The Interview

When I can spare the time, my favorite hobby is to go into the garage, put some music on, and work on my cars. I enjoy it so much, sometimes it has bothered me. If you should do what you love, and given a choice I would rather spend my time in the garage, why am I a neuroscientist? Shouldn't I be a mechanical engineer?

Upon reflection, I realized I do love neuroscience, but it is simply impossible to do bench level neuroscience at home. All of my previous homemade neuroscience has consisted of satirical or theoretical writing that did not require any equipment besides a brain and a labtop. So...for this year's Society for Neuroscience meeting, my close friend and colleague Greg Gage and I decided to attempt to do some amateur neuroscience on the cheap, within the budget of a middle class high school student.

If you have a labtop, an insect, and $100, can you record an action potential using components solely obtained from RadioShack and Ace Hardware? We tried to answer this. Greg spent his spare time the last two months working on the electronics, and I worked on the micromanipulator. We presented our work in progress at the Society for Neuroscience conference in Washington, D.C. last week, and the response was overwhelming. DrugMonkey, a blog journalist writer for ScienceBlogs, covered the event rather nicely for us. Educators heavily encouraged us to complete the project and begin delivering it to students. Wow!

I also contacted Kerri Smith, the podcast editor for Nature Magazine, who was attending the conference, and she interviewed us for the Nature Neuroscience Podcast. You can listen to the ~1 hour podcast highlighting research from the whole conference here, or if you just want to listen to our bit, that clip is here (also embedded above). Thanks Kerri!

Stayed tuned y'all; I am already working on prototype V. We are close to fully operational spike.

Organism of choice, but I am beginning to look into crayfish as well.

Prototype IV of the MicroManipulator: 3 degrees of freedom, but still contains a little wobble that new prototypes should fix.

Greg's two pole bandpass filter pass plus amplifier on a breadboard. He is looking into alternative low noise op amps that cost 1 -2 cents more, still within our budget.

Finishing our presentation the night before at the hotel bar. Our first reviewers were the barflies, and they gave us great advice on the presentation format. That's Greg on the left, me on the right.

Greg delivering our message of neuroscience liberation to our colleagues and converts.

******

Finally, if you came to my blog in search of satirical neuroscience, here are the links to pdf's of our group's (Greg, Hirak, and me) previous work.

SfN 2005 Stock Market Behavior Predicted by Rat Neurons
(satirical poke at overuse of correlation)

SfN 2006 How Many Neurons Must One Man Have, Before You Call Him a Man?

(educational/semi-serious thought experiment on long-term memory...the paper finally just came out; all figures hand drawn!)

SfN 2007 Cingular Theory of Unification: The Cingulate Cortex Does Everything
(satirical poke at overinterpretation of fMRI mapping data)
The work will appear in a German book, translated in German, in early 2009.
Gage G. Marzullo T. Parikh H. "Die Cinguläre Theorie der Vereinigung: Der Gyrus Cinguli ist Für Alle Geistigen Leistungen Zuständig." in the book "Braintertainment 2.0"
An abridged version also appeared in a recent issue of the Annals of Improbable Research, and you can watch a youtube version of the work.

Enjoy! We encourage any readers out there to tackle issues in their own science field through satire. Sometimes scientists take themselves too seriously in the importance of their results (I sometimes do this as well), and a good-humored joke can spark more serious discussion of the limitations of our tools and methods.