Ultrasound opens the brain’s barrier to Alzheimer’s drugs in tiny trials
About 260 people with Alzheimer’s have had the procedure across 27 studies, none of them randomized, and the most striking result so far comes from three patients.
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The Barbican’s Feel the Sound opens in Tokyo on November 20
The immersive sound show from London runs at MoN Takanawa until March 22, with work by Ryuichi Sakamoto and Daito Manabe, Max Cooper and…
Hearing-loss patients in a Chinese hospital had worse blood fats
Among 580 ear patients in Luzhou, those admitted for inner-ear hearing loss had higher triglycerides and LDL and lower HDL than those admitted for…
Oulu Cathedral plays 4,000 fast radio bursts every day at noon
The Logos, built with an MIT astrophysicist, turns radio flashes caught by Canada’s CHIME telescope into an hour of sound through 12 speakers, through…
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FeaturesThe long reads
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Histotripsy breaks up liver tumors with sound, and the trials show where it stands
The pivotal trial hit 95% of its targets, but its one-year tumor control reads 63% or 90% depending on how the scans are judged.
Gene therapy for deafness now targets its most common genetic cause
After April’s approval for a gene behind about 1% of congenital deafness, a Cambridge trial is dosing 10 children with GJB2 variants, and its…
Thirteen unresponsive ICU patients changed a tone using thought alone
In a Columbia study of 41 brain-injured patients who could not move or speak, a third shifted a beep’s pitch through bedside EEG, and…
Science
More →Gentle brain ultrasound reaches deep targets but has not yet proved it helps
A critical review in Frontiers in Neuroscience counts 177 registered trials worldwide, finds most human studies under 20 people, and says no…
Shockwave therapy probably eases frozen shoulder pain, but only short term
A BMJ review of 189 trials and 12,988 adults found pulses of sound cut early pain by about two points out of…
A bandage-sized ultrasound implant watches the injured spinal cord
Johns Hopkins engineers tested the device in pigs and human cadavers, and in healthy pigs its focused ultrasound changed how fast blood…
Practice
More →How to try a sound bath without buying the hype
Singing bowls and gongs have moved into offices and cathedrals; the studies behind them are small and single-session, and worth knowing before…
The 10-minute birdsong reset, and why traffic cancels it
Two 2026 studies found 10 minutes of birdsong raised heart-rate variability and improved mood, and that road noise below WHO limits erased…
Bring your own playlist to the needle and the scanner
In a 204-patient Zürich trial, patients’ own favorite music cut cannulation pain where “relaxation music” did nothing, and a 57-study review explains…
Culture
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Bill Fontana made Grace Cathedral listen to San Francisco
For nearly 13 weeks this summer, sensors on the carillon and microphones inside silent organ pipes turned the building into an instrument played by…
A humpback’s song is shaped by the dive that carries it
Suction-cup tags on 16 singing males off Maui mapped whole songs onto whole dives for the first time, and some singers kept going for…
Two weeks left to hear Salisbury Cathedral’s Singing Gallery
“Joyful Noise” closes October 25; Emeka Ogboh’s choir sings from the medieval gallery above the west doors, and Deaf artist Christine Sun Kim makes…
BriefsThe news, read for you
The week in sound →The Barbican’s Feel the Sound opens in Tokyo on November 20
The immersive sound show from London runs at MoN Takanawa until March 22, with work by Ryuichi Sakamoto and Daito Manabe, Max Cooper and Evelyn Glennie.
Hearing-loss patients in a Chinese hospital had worse blood fats
Among 580 ear patients in Luzhou, those admitted for inner-ear hearing loss had higher triglycerides and LDL and lower HDL than those admitted for other ear…
Oulu Cathedral plays 4,000 fast radio bursts every day at noon
The Logos, built with an MIT astrophysicist, turns radio flashes caught by Canada’s CHIME telescope into an hour of sound through 12 speakers, through April 2027.
Mice picked out calls in noise better once they learned the noise
In a 10-mouse study at Radboud University, the longer a background hiss played before a call, the more often the animals caught it, and their auditory…
A review of 141 histotripsy studies tallies what has gone wrong
Serious complications turned up in about 6% of clinical liver treatments, and the authors say longer follow-up and open reporting have to catch up with the…
Traffic noise tracked with heart risk even in people who slept well
In records from 108,051 adults in a Boston hospital biobank, living with more than 50 dB of road, rail and air noise went with more heart…
ExplainersThe physics and the physiology, plainly
Start here →
What sand on a vibrating plate actually shows
Cymatics turns a tone into a star of sand or a hexagon of water. The physics is 340…
What is a sound wave, and why 432 Hz is not magic
Pressure, frequency, amplitude and resonance in plain language, and why the 432 Hz and 528 Hz “healing tuning”…
Binaural beats, the evidence on one page
A February 2026 review found 10 small trials in people aged 19 to 24, and a 308-person company…
How your ear turns air pressure into perception
From eardrum to a coiled piano keyboard inside the skull, with 15,000 hair cells that do not grow…