#inner ear

Whenever anon spends more than an hour in water or on a boat, their inner ear "calibrates" itself to the constant rocking motion of waves. When they're back on solid ground, they'll still feel that rocking/bobbing motion for a few hours, as though their inner ear still thinks they're on the water. They almost never get motion sick from anything (cars, planes, etc). On the other hand, one of their friends experiences motion sickness quite often, and does not experience the same inner ear "calibration," so anon wonders if it's related.

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Scientists have created a more efficient and controlled way to produce lab-grown inner ear hair cells than current methods allow, offering a new tool for hearing loss research. The study, published today as a Reviewed Preprint in eLife, is described by the editors as important work, substantially advancing our understanding of the factors that can induce hair cell-like cells from human stem cells. They add that the evidence supporting the findings is compelling.

Seeing Sound Sensors

Tiny 'hairs' or cilia in bundles on cells of the inner ear respond to sound by transducing mechanical into electrical energy for the brain to interpret. Here, an open-source, deep learning-based tool called VASCilia, which plugs into 3D confocal microscopy data analysis software, enables stereocilia bundles to be rapidly quantified and characterised – advancing capabilities in hearing research

Read the published research article here

Image from work by Yasmin M. Kassim and colleagues

Department of Cell & Developmental Biology, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA

Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Published in PLOS Biology, January 2026

cochlear implant