Pre-treatment with honokiol—a multifunctional small molecule extracted from herbal medicine (the genus Magnolia)—reduced high-frequency hearing loss and protected cochlear function.

I’m a product designer, and my connections with theater professionals drew my attention to the work behind captioning. Preparing captions can take days. During the show, someone usually has to advance them line by line.

Optical coherence tomography promises to capture functional biology in real time, which could prove revolutionary for better understanding complex hearing disorders.

Fifty percent of maximum volume on a power-hungry headphone can be quite gentle. Fifty percent on a sensitive pair of earbuds, plugged into a strong source, can be loud enough to permanently harm hearing.

Hearing Health Foundation (HHF) is very pleased to announce the addition of four new members to our Board of Directors: Andreas H. Eckhard, M.D., Steven D. Rauch, M.D., Konstantina Stankovic, M.D., Ph.D., FACS, and Daniel J. Tollin, Ph.D. 

A person becomes hard of hearing, caregivers and families start raising their voices, no one likes shouting at another person, the conversations decline.

A simple, universal visual warning system (like a red, yellow, or green noise-level indicator at a concert venue, racetrack, or theme park) instantly conveys danger, warning, or safety to people of all ages. Combined with access to basic foam earplugs and insertion instructions, a simple prompt can transform behavior.

Hearing loss began affecting how I saw myself. There is a word in Chinese that describes how I felt: 自卑 (zìbēi), a feeling of insecurity and inferiority that makes you shrink yourself around other people.

Our Emerging Research Grants program is the leading seed funding opportunity for early stage researchers. ERG also includes Expanded and Focused Discovery Awards, which are grant opportunities in specific topics (such as central auditory processing disorder, hyperacusis, Ménière’s disease, and tinnitus) that are open to eligible investigators at any career stage.

Otoaging is a new word I coined to describe both the premature aging of cochlear hair cells and synapses caused by noise, and the end result, hearing loss in old age. I was inspired by the term photoaging, used by dermatologists to describe the premature aging of the skin by sun.

In addition to recent or current grantees, to underscore the lasting implications that basic science research can hold, scientists whose funding was a decade—or decades—ago cite HHF in new papers stemming from their grants.

This study provides evidence that TECTB is a novel human deafness gene. In addition, it reveals a gene–environment interaction in which the variant sensitizes the cochlea to noise trauma, leading to long‐term functional consequences.