Official News page 10

REAL LIFE NEWS: TURN IT DOWN, DOCTOR

by Hazed

If you are a regular visitor to clubs or music gigs you are probably used to coming out of them deafened, with your ears ringing, particularly if you were standing close to the speakers. Perhaps you take steps to avoid this by jamming earplugs into your ears, or using noise-canceling headphones, but that's not very cool.

So you'll be interested to know that doctors and scientists have come up with an alternative: a pill that could "turn down" your ears, making them less sensitive so they are protected from damage at noisy clubs or concerts.

The theory is that a drug can manipulate a protein which is found on the sensory hair cells in the ear, to make them less responsive to sound. In experiments on mice, the boffins were able to produce a group of mutant mice whose hearing had been chemically turned down. Together with a control group of normal mice, they were exposed to noise levels the equivalent of what you might experience at a noisy gig - specifically, 100 decibels. That's loud. The mutated mice suffered much less damage from the music than did the non-modified mice.

This could lead to pills, or even stick-on patches, which could temporarily turn down the hearing of clubbers and music lovers.

Of course, there's a danger that DJs and musicians would respond by simply pumping up the volume in order to get around the diminished ears... and we could enter an arms race. Or an ear race.

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