Proteins long known to be essential for hearing have been hiding a talent: they also act as gatekeepers that shuffle fatty molecules across cell membranes. When this newly discovered function goes ...

Evolution has left humans with many vestigial traits—remnants of once-useful biological features that serve little or no modern purpose. One such example is the muscles around our ears, which in many ...

Ancient ear-wiggling muscles kick on when people strain to hear. That auricular activity, described January 30 in Frontiers in Neuroscience, probably doesn’t do much, if anything. But these small ...