The ear can hear an astonishing range of sounds and even produce sounds of its own. Francesco Gianoli wants to understand how it achieves such extraordinary sensitivity. As he prepares to set up a new...

We are creatures of sensation, with hundreds of millions of photoreceptors, millions more for touch, smell, and taste. Yet, in each ear, only 16000 sensory hair cells allow us to hear from a whisper t...

Shortly before his death in August 2025, A. James Hudspeth and his team in the Laboratory of Sensory Neuroscience at The Rockefeller University achieved a groundbreaking technological advancement: the ability to keep a tiny sliver of the cochlea alive and functional outside of the body for the first time.

Communication is crucial to social life, and in ants, it is mediated primarily through olfaction. Ants have more odorant receptor (OR) genes than any other group of insects, generated through tandem d...

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A. James Hudspeth, a Rockefeller neuroscientist who discovered how sound waves are converted into electrical signals in the ear's cochlea, died Saturday at his home in Manhattan. A pioneering scientist and dedicated mentor, he was the university's F.M. ...

Researchers at the University Medical Center Göttingen (UMG) and the Göttingen Cluster of Excellence “Multiscale Bioimaging” (MBExC) have shown how a minimal change in a single ion channel increases t...

What gives the human ear its remarkable ability to detect the faintest sounds and discern subtle shifts in pitch? For decades, scientists have recognized that our hearing depends on an “active process...

Hearing hinges upon the ear’s ability to enhance its responsiveness by means of an energy-expending active process that amplifies the very mechanic...