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Cochlear implants—medical devices that electrically stimulate the auditory nerve—have granted at least limited hearing to hundreds of thousands of people worldwide who otherwise would be totally deaf. Existing versions of the device, however, require that a disk-shaped transmitter about an inch in diameter be affixed to the skull, with a wire snaking down to a joint microphone and power source that looks like an oversized hearing aid around the patient’s ear.

The pollutants measured in the sediments of Guánica Bay, Puerto Rico, in a new NOAA study were among the highest concentrations of PCBs, chlordane, chromium and nickel ever measured in the history of NOAA’s National Status & Trends, a nationwide contaminant monitoring program that began in 1986.

An extensive study by Radboud University Nijmegen on excrement and rumen fluids in plant-eating mammals from all over the whole world shows that the ciliates in their guts have evolved in parallel with them. This is the result of a five-year research project performed by evolution biologists, microbiologists and computer scientists at Radboud University Nijmegen and published this week in the European Journal of Protistology.

Children and adults sidelined by serious illness and immobility from life as healthy people know it b may find relief from anxiety and depression with a “pill” in the form of online games, a drug-free mood enhancer that reminds them they are still in the game of life. For quadriplegics, a mouth-operated game controller can open up the experience of console games; the controller has been launched in a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter.

Sponges are an important animal for marine and freshwater ecology and represent a rich animal diversity found throughout the world, from tropical climates to the arctic poles. For evolutionary biologists, they also present an interesting animal for comparative study because they are simple filter feeders, and lack nervous, digestive or circulatory systems, suggesting that they diverged early from other animals.

(Phys.org) —Horses face high risks of developing eye problems, and Cornell clinicians have developed a new way to detect and diagnose them more safely and quickly than before. Published online in January in the journal Veterinary Ophthalmology, their findings are the first to show how horses with microscopic foreign objects in their eyes can benefit from in vivo corneal confocal microscopy, a human medical technique that allows doctors to take pictures of living eyes in microscopic detail without a scratch.

In 2010, Zim Rogers was waiting to hear from his bosses about whether he would be promoted. Rogers, who works in global securities, said that instead of getting a better job, he was fired after a cursory Google search turned up an 11-year-old mug shot and records in Florida of an arrest on suspicion of drunk driving and driving without a license – charges that were later reduced to misdemeanors and dismissed, his attorney said.

The Congressional agenda for 2014 includes science issues with far-reaching implications for an array of issues including public health, job growth, pharmaceutical research and energy, according to an article in Chemical & Engineering News, the weekly newsmagazine of the American Chemical Society. The mid-term elections occurring this fall, however, promise to complicate progress on key legislative efforts, already stymied by a bitter partisan atmosphere.

The thyroid hormone thyroxine, which controls our day-to-day activity and was previously believed to remain at a constant level in the blood, actually fluctuates as a result of a protein which modifies the release of the hormone depending on body temperature, new research reveals. The research was published today, 29 January, in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

(Phys.org) —Initial results from experiments conducted in the Santa Monica Mountains by a botanist at the University of California, Riverside and her colleagues indicate that high levels of nitrogen may adversely impact native plants and, by extension, increase the risk of wildfire.