Just back from Society for Neuroscience (http://www.sfn.org/annual-meeting/neuroscience-2013) which was a five day fest of all things neuro and feel very much revitalised about our work. Aside from the forthcoming posts about more research-relevant things arising from SfN, I was delighted to see that Backyard Brains (https://backyardbrains.com/) had a stand at the conference as I bought one of their very early ‘build your own ‘ Spikerbox’ kits (https://backyardbrains.com/products/diyspikerbox) a year or so ago; the kids and I had great fun doing some earthworm and other invertebrate experiments and we built a cheap and cheerful Faraday cage from an XBox360 case!

So taken by their latest offering, I immediately snapped up their EMG Spikerbox kit (https://backyardbrains.com/products/emgspikerboxkit), complete with conductive gel, cables, electrodes etc. and have been looking forward to playing with this on my return. True to my word, I unpacked and – in a highly jet lagged state – worked my way through the muscle action potential experiment just to get familiar with the kit (https://backyardbrains.com/experiments/muscleAP). It’s another really excellent piece of kit and am now struck by the idea that it could make a fantastic MPharm project that develops new experiments that could be taken into schools as part of outreach events. I wonder if I can persuade any of my project students to rise to the challenge?

Anyway, lots more to do with the kit this weekend as I finally got Audacity configured to acquire the spike data and so now need to start spike detecting and sorting (see http://wiki.backyardbrains.com/Data_Analysis for details of how to get data onto PC/<insert name of device>).