Evolution likes to borrow. It can take an already-successful biological structure and alter it until it serves a new function. Two independent groups studying the proteins that organize gut microvilli ...

Scientists at the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) report that they have discovered some key mechanisms underlying how stereocilia — the tiny hair-like ...

The sensory cells of the inner ear have tiny hairs called stereocilia that play a critical part in hearing. It has long been known that these stereocilia move sideways back and forth when stimulated ...

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 ...

The MIMS instrument acquires repeated images, slowly etching the surface to create thousands of XY planes with a Z resolution of approximately 1 nm allowing the creation of a three-dimensional ...

Hearing is made possible when hair bundles protruding from the tops of hair cells capture the energy of sound waves, converting them into electrical signals that stimulate the auditory nerve to the ...

Researchers from the Salk Institute and the University of Sheffield completed a study that they say shows promise for the development of gene therapies to repair hearing loss. In developed countries, ...

The cochlea is the spiral-shaped structure within the inner ear responsible for our sense of hearing. To fully understand hearing functions and open the door to new hearing loss treatments, scientists ...

Researchers at Linköping University, Sweden, 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 ...