Reposted by Florian Berger
The quieter the sound, the harder your hair bundles work to amplify it. An international team—including members of the Hudspeth lab at Rockefeller—shows that hair bundles sense, amplify, dissipate heat, or even act as tiny refrigerators.
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Thermodynamic Signatures of Sensing and Amplification by Periodically Driven Hair-Cell Bundles
By operating in different thermodynamic modes, hair cell bundles in the inner ear dynamically regulate power exchange with mechanical signals at the smallest biological scales.
