Hair cells play a critical role in our hearing. When they are damaged, doctors say they act like blades of grass. When someone walks on grass, the blades initially lie down and then bounce back up. But if you keep walking the same path repeatedly, the grass stays down. Hair cells are the same way. If you send sound waves from the outside without giving the cells time to recover, you can rip them out with excessive noise. Hair cells do not grow back.

On this date (April 20) in 1786, John Goodricke died. Goodricke only survived to the age of 21, but the deaf astronomer made a major impact on his field. Working with Edward Pigott, Goodricke learned to measure the variation of light coming from stars. This would eventually lead astronomers to figure out the distance of galaxies from the Earth. While still a teenager, the Royal Society of London awarded him the Copley Medal, making him the youngest person to be given its high

Annie Jump Cannon was born Dec. 11, 1863. The deaf astronomer was also a suffragist. New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper via Wikimedia Commons Cannon lost most of her hearing in childhood, which has been attributed to scarlet fever. The valedictorian of her class at Wellesley College, she became an astronomer at the Harvard College Observatory. She worked with another prominent deaf astronomer: Henrietta Swan Leavitt. Despite getting paid at half the rate paid to m

Researchers say they have pinpointed the place in the brain where sign language is processed. Scientists point to what is known as...