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Hearing loss is usually irreversible because there’s no way to grow back the necessary outer and inner ear sensory cells once they’ve been killed off. But we may have started on the path to change, thanks to new research in mice.

Scientists have discovered a single master gene that’s able to regulate whether ear hair cells into the outer or inner types required to restore hearing. That’s a significant step forward in being able to actually carry this out in the lab.

The master gene is called TBX2. Through experiments on mice, the team found that when it’s expressed, ear hair cells become inner hair cells; when it’s blocked, ear hair cells become outer hair cells. It’s a crucial toggle switch.

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Biomarker timestamps:
Glucose 1:37
HDL 2:43
Triglycerides 4:10
RBCs, Hemoglobin 5:29
Platelets 7:16
Uric Acid 8:37
AST, ALT 11:04
Total Cholesterol 13:55
WBCs 15:47
Total Protein, Albumin, Globulin 17:38
Creatinine 21:27
BUN 22:35

Papers referenced in the video:
Laboratory parameters in centenarians of Italian ancestry.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17681733/

Risk Factors For Hyperuricemia In Chinese Centenarians And Near-Centenarians.

Those who call for mandatory reporting have the right intent, but if it’s not implemented in the right way, it will cause more harm than good.

Mandatory reporting almost always puts companies at risk, either legally or through financial penalties. Penalizing an organization for not reporting a breach in time puts it in a worse cybersecurity posture because it is a strong incentive to turn a blind eye to attacks. Alternatively, if a company knows of a breach, it will find ways to “classify” it in a way that falls into a reporting loophole.

The reporting timelines in the law are arbitrary and not based in the reality of effective incident response. The first hours and days after a breach are integral to the actual incident reporting process, but they are chaotic, and teams are sleep-deprived. Working with lawyers to determine how to report and figuring out the evidence that companies do and don’t want to “see” just makes the process harder.

An international group of astronomers led by Benjamin Thomas of The University of Texas at Austin has used observations from the Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET) at the university’s McDonald Observatory to unlock a puzzling mystery about a stellar explosion discovered several years ago and evolving even now. The results, published in today’s issue of The Astrophysical Journal, will help astronomers better understand the process of how massive stars live and die.

When an is first detected, astronomers around the world begin to follow it with telescopes as the light it gives off changes rapidly over time. They see the light from a supernova get brighter, eventually peak, and then start to dim. By noting the times of these peaks and valleys in the light’s brightness, called a “,” as well as the characteristic wavelengths of light emitted at different times, they can deduce the physical characteristics of the system.

“I think what’s really cool about this kind of science is that we’re looking at the emission that’s coming from matter that’s been cast off from the progenitor system before it exploded as a supernova,” Thomas said. “And so this makes a sort of time machine.”