More cisplatin enters the inner ear in an animal model than oxaliplatin. The difference may explain why cisplatin treatment in humans can lead to hearing problems while oxaliplatin rarely does.

Our ability to hear is made possible by way of a Rube Goldberg-style process in which sound vibrations entering the ear shake and jostle a successive chain of structures until, lo and behold, they are converted into electrical signals that can be interpreted by the brain.

The hearing precision that lets common barn owls find prey is helping researchers fine tune their quest to diagnose a variety of problems rooted in the human brain, not only with hearing but also with behavior and potentially damaged areas.

The scientist who discovered "Sly Syndrome" nearly four decades ago and a team of colleagues at Saint Louis University are a step closer to finding an approach to treat the rare genetic disease.

Researchers at Georgetown University Medical Center and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have, for the first time, used a "bionic" ear to restore hearing in a patient with von Hippel-Lindau disease. They say this advance offers new hope for individuals with the rare disorder, which can produce non-malignant tumors in ears, as well as in the eyes, brain, and kidneys.

Modern hearing aids, though quite sophisticated, still do not faithfully reproduce sound as hearing people perceive it. New findings at the Weizmann Institute of Science shed light on a crucial mechanism for discerning different sound frequencies and thus may have implications for the design of better hearing aids.