The act of hearing is like a ballroom dance, scientist Jaime García-Añoveros says. Tiny hair cells lined up in the outer ear leap and sway, transmitting sound’s vibrations to other hair cells in the ...

Hearing loss due to aging, noise and certain cancer drugs has been irreversible, because scientists have not been able to reprogram existing cells to develop into the outer and inner ear sensory cells ...

The discovery of a genetic switch could be instrumental in producing mechanosensory hair cells of the inner ear that die due to aging, loud noises, chemotherapy, or antibiotics, resulting in deafness.

Scientists studying the mechanisms behind deafness have pinpointed a single gene they describe as a type of master switch for cell differentiation, opening up exciting new possibilities around ...

Most of the cells in your body have an internal "skeleton" that maintains the shape of the cell. Several types of relatively stiff large molecules normally make up the so called cytoskeleton. These ...

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Vol. 116, No. 51 (December 17, 2019), pp. 25948-25957 (10 pages) The function of outer hair cells (OHCs), the ...

Diagnosing damage to a special group of sensory cells in the ear that affects hearing and determining whether a new pharmaceutical compound can protect the inner ear against hearing loss will be the ...

Northwestern Medicine scientists have uncovered how a specific type of cell in the inner ear plays a commanding role in shaping the cellular landscape of the organ responsible for hearing, according ...

Researchers have made several discoveries on the functioning mechanisms of the inner hair cells of the ear, which convert sounds into nerve signals that are processed in the brain. The results ...

The hearing organ in mammals is a spiraling structure called the "cochlea" from the Greek word for snail. It spirals out from the saccule (one of the balance organs). There are two and a half turns in ...