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…
Bird songs across 350 species follow three rules of human speech
A McGill team compared 70,000 song units from 350-plus bird species with speech and song in 52 languages, and learning to sing made almost…
Amplifon grew 3.6% in the third quarter as its GN Hearing deal nears
The Italian hearing-care chain said private-pay US demand held up, and its shareholders approved the new shares that pay for ReSound’s maker.
Beads held up by sound show how static charge builds
A Bristol team floated two polystyrene beads on sound waves and knocked them together again and again, and the charge built up like a…
New guidelines say raise cochlear implants early for severe hearing loss
Seventeen authors in eight countries updated the 2020 best-practice guide, adding music, Auracast and sign language, and several work for or are funded by…
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.
One violin lesson shifted beginners’ brain rhythms in a wearable scanner
Nottingham researchers scanned 19 novices playing a metal-free violin before and after a 30-minute lesson; beta waves rose about 4%, but their self-rated playing…
Male mosquitoes need one gene to hear the females’ 450 Hz hum
Without a gene called fruitless, male yellow fever mosquitoes’ ears sent signals one-sixth as strong and the males stopped flying toward female wingbeat tones.
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…
Mother bats’ hearts race at the calls of their own pups
In four Japanese house bats, heart rate rose by about 51 beats a minute to their own month-old pups’ echolocation calls and barely moved…
Hajra Waheed’s hummed protest songs close in Genoa and Roskilde
Two parts of the artist’s HUM trilogy, songs of resistance sung with closed lips, are free to hear until November 5 in Genoa and…
A cochlear implant with no outside parts goes on sale in Europe
MED-EL’s TICI UNICO puts the microphone and a 40-hour battery under the skin; 40 people had one by launch day, and the 30-patient trial…
Humans follow the pitch of a melody, zebra finches follow its color
Trained on the same five-tone sequences, people relied on pitch while finches combined pitch with formants, and musical training changed how the humans listened.
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