Science
What the research actually shows — studies, mechanisms, and honest uncertainty.
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 indication is…
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 ten, with…
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 moved in…
Treating both sides of the brain with ultrasound helped Parkinson’s, at a cost
In a nine-centre trial of 54 patients, a second incisionless ultrasound lesion added modest motor gains, and one in four had lasting speech, gait…
Saved low-pitch hearing did little for children with cochlear implants
Blocking the natural low-pitch hearing of 14 Manchester children with an earplug barely changed their scores, but most of that hearing was never amplified.
Cochlear implants that use light sent sharper signals in gerbils
A Göttingen team paired gene therapy with implants carrying 5 to 10 green LEDs, and the brain told the channels apart better than it…
In Alzheimer’s, the songs that stay familiar come from earlier childhood
A Helsinki study of 101 older adults found pleasure in old songs held steady as dementia advanced, while the songs that felt familiar slid…
Singing did no better than conversation in a small dementia trial
Fifteen Amsterdam nursing-home residents tried both a singing group and a talking group; each helped in a different way, and neither came out ahead.
Phantom music is not mainly a hearing-loss problem, a Dutch study finds
Among 80 people in The Hague who hear music no one is playing, half had no documented hearing loss, and most heard old hymns…
Music calmed stressed bodies faster than water sounds in a brain-scan study
In 120 volunteers put through timed mental arithmetic, relaxing music brought heart rate and sweating down faster than soothing water sounds, but only when…
Hearing tests found four hearing-loss genes that diagnosis codes missed
A Vanderbilt team ran the same genetic search twice, once on billing codes for 61,469 people and once on audiograms from 16,057, and only…
One night of quiet road noise stiffens blood vessels by morning
In 74 healthy adults sleeping in their own beds, 30 to 60 simulated traffic pass-bys at 41 to 44 dB, below WHO night limits,…