You won’t notice it, but when you listen hard enough, your ears — or at least the muscles around them — spring into action. Though (most) humans lost the ability to wiggle their ears ...

An older man presses his fingers to the side of his head, next to his ear. To test whether humans still use auricular muscles — which once helped move our primate ancestors’ ears to funnel sound — ...

These auricular muscles helped change the shape of the pinna, or the shell of the ear, funneling sound to the eardrums. Millions of years ago, our ancestors stopped using them, so humans ...

From rawpixel.com via Freepik Tens of millions of years ago, our ancestors could swivel their ears to pick up sounds, much like cats and dogs do today. Humans lost that ability over time ...

Female ear with earring close up. Ear of woman blonde with decorative piercing. Parts of body, organs of hearing Sound waves travelling through human ear The journey of sound from the external ...

Research conducted at the University of Saarland in Germany has found that humans also have the ability to move their ears in response to sound. Robert Wiederheim, a German anatomist active in the ...

Most humans have lost the ability to wiggle their ears, but that doesn’t mean their ear muscles have given up. New research suggests that, when we strain to hear in a noisy environment, these muscles ...

It can feel nice to run your nails over an itchy bit of skin ... called haptens to induce eczema-like symptoms on mice’s ears. The ears of mice that could scratch at will swelled up more ...

Scratching where it itches reduces the presence of potentially harmful bacteria on the skin, studies in mice show.