Features

Aural History

Hearing Help

The Great Big Clean-Up
Lab Tools

Orchestrating Organoids
A guide to crafting tissues in a dish that reprise in vivo organs

Compatible Company
A guide to culturing cells with viruses in mind
Bio Business

The Sounds of Silence
Science-based tinnitus therapeutics are finally coming into their own.
Capsule Reviews

Capsule Reviews
Brain Storms, Orphan, Maize for the Gods, and Paranoid.
The Literature

Hearing Discrepancy Probed
Common in vitro experiments have distorted the true mechanics of mammalian hair cell stereocilia.

Inner Ear Undertakers
Support cells in the inner ear respond differently to two drugs that kill hair cells.

The Regenerators
A molecular signature makes it possible to trace the details of hair cell replacement in the mammalian inner ear.
Profiles

The Ears Have It
A teaching obligation in graduate school introduced James Hudspeth to a career focused on how vertebrates sense sounds.
Scientist to Watch

Khaleel Razak: Hearing Engineer
Associate Professor, Department of Psychology University of California, Riverside. Age: 44
Reading Frames

Do Mine Ears Deceive Me?
A new approach shows how both honesty and deception are stable features of noisy communication.
Foundations

Whaling Specimens, 1930s
Fetal specimens collected by commercial whalers offer insights into how whales may have evolved their specialized hearing organs.
Modus Operandi

Inner Ear Cartography
Scientists map the position of cells within the organ of Corti.
The Basics

Human Hearing: A Primer
How the human ear translates sound waves into nervous impulses
Contributors

Contributors
Meet some of the people featured in the September 2015 issue of The Scientist.
Editorial

Hear and Now
Auditory research advances worth shouting about
Speaking of Science

Speaking of Science
September 2015's selection of notable quotes
Notebook

Lending an Ear
Until recently, auditory brainstem implants have been restricted to patients with tumors on their auditory nerves.

Musical Scales
The quest to document an ancient sea creature reveals a cyclical chorus of fish songs.

The Upside
Researchers explore the benefits of hearing loss and impairment.

Handicapable
Meet Tilak Ratnanather, the deaf biomedical engineer who mentors hard-of-hearing students headed for STEM careers.
Critic at Large

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

Body, Heal Thyself
Reviving a decades-old hypothesis of autoimmunity