(Phys.org) -- The word “cochlea” comes from the Latin for “snail shell.” While this inner ear component has a clear spiral shape, it’s currently unclear why that is. In the 1980s, scientists supposed ...

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 ...

The next time someone whispers in your ear, think "cochlea." The cochlea is the marvelous structure in the inner ear that is shaped like a snail shell and transforms sounds into the nerve impulses ...

The inner ear is a marvel of evolution, but scientists are still puzzled over certain aspects of its operation. Two related studies detail how scientists successfully excised a sliver of an inner ear ...

Until now, the part of the ear that processes speech was poorly reflected in computer models, but University of Michigan researchers have figured out the math that describes how it works—which could ...

The cochlea is key to human hearing, and it plays an important role in our understanding of complex frequency content. The Visual Ear project aims to illustrate the cochlear mechanism as an ...

Sound and vibrations that cause the skull bone to vibrate can be heard as ordinary sounds and this is termed hearing by bone conduction (BC). Not all mechanisms that causes a skull vibration to result ...

For decades, hearing experts thought that the cochlea's spiral shape was simply an efficient packing job and its shape had no effect on how this critical hearing organ functions. But a recent study by ...

The cochlea is the portion of the inner ear that senses sound vibrations and converts them into electrical signals that the auditory system can interpret. The cochlea is an example of active cellular ...

Researchers have been able to document and visualize hearing loss-associated genes in the human inner ear, in a unique collaboration study between otosurgeons and geneticists. The findings illustrate ...