Science News

Walters' doctors have been able to grow an ear on her arm and then attach it to the side of her face, giving her a functioning ear again.

The researchers looked at the bony labyrinth in fossil remains and compared them to CT scans previously obtained from living primate species. The bony labyrinth of the inner ear is made up of the cochlea — the major organ of hearing — the vestibule and the three semicircular canals which sense head motion and provide input to synchronize movement with visual stimuli.

A two-year old British girl born severely deaf due to a developmental disorder has spoken her first word after receiving a bionic ear.

As computer hardware and software becomes ever more powerful, they find ways to match and then exceed many human abilities. One point of superiority that humans have stubbornly refused to yield is tuning musical instruments. Pythagoras identified the precise, mathematical relationships between musical tones over 2,000 years ago, and modern machines can beat out any human when it comes to precise math. So why aren’t computers better than people? The professional tuner does have one incontrovertible advantage: a trained human ear.