After a decades-long pursuit, researchers have confirmed the identity of the pore of the mechanotransduction channel in vertebrates’ inner ear hair cells.

A teaching obligation in graduate school introduced James Hudspeth to a career focused on how vertebrates sense sounds.

Biofilms are home to millions of microbes, but disrupting their interactions could produce more effective antibiotics.

Given the diverse cell types and complex structure of the human inner ear, will researchers ever be able to re-create it?

What better way to create the ideal in vivo environment, in vitro, than via CO2 incubation? In 1885, Wilhelm Roux kept the medullary plate of a chicken embryo alive for several days in saline solution. Since CO2 incubators became commercially available in the late 1960s, manufacturers have been given the opportunity to improve their incubators and introduce cell culturing to the age of high-tech biotechnology. With numerous options available for most CO2 incubators, it is important to determine

Ear to the Grindstone A Different Way Art For Earth's Sake Magnetic Personality Antimatter Matters While hearing aid manufacturers keep trying to make a less cumbersome and noticeable appliance, University of Virginia graduate student Jonathan Spindel has delved into the subject a little deeper. He has developed a device that transmits sound via a tiny magnet permanently implanted on the "round window" of the inner ear and an electromagnetic coil placed a short distance from the magnet.

Microbes, traditionally thought to lack organelles, get a metabolic boost from geometric compartments that act as cauldrons for chemical reactions. Bioengineers are eager to harness the compartments for their own purposes.

I?m an obvious beneficiary of medical technology. Without the computer surgically embedded in my skull, I?d be totally deaf. The device, called a ?cochlear implant,? routes past my damaged inner ear by triggering my auditory nerves with sixteen tiny electrodes coiled up inside my cochlea. It?s not a cure, though, any more than glasses cure vision loss. It?s a prosthesis, a workaround. Compared to the extraordinary delicacy and precision of naturally evolved organs, it?s clumsy. It?s like

Discoveries of microbial communities that transfer electrons between cells and across relatively long distances are launching a new field of microbiology.

New approaches to diagnosing bacterial infections may one day allow the identification of pathogens and their antibiotic susceptibility in a matter of hours or minutes.