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Andrew King enjoys a personal account of the impact of sound on life, evolution and the brain.

Auditory contrast gain control helps us perceive sounds as constant despite changes in the environment or background noise. Here, the authors show that neurons in the auditory thalamus and midbrain of mice display independent contrast gain control, not just the cortex as previously thought.

Sensory circuits can adapt flexibly to changes in inputs yet the neural mechanisms related to experience dependent plasticity are not well understood. Here, the authors use optogenetic approaches in ferrets to show that suppression of auditory cortex during sound localization training can affect learning.

In the primary auditory cortex, visual or tactile stimuli can modulate acoustically-driven activity. Here, the authors show that circuits linking the primary somatosensory cortex to both the auditory midbrain and thalamus allow tactile inputs to modulate auditory thalamocortical processing.

Extreme rainfall events are often linked to climate change based on simple thermodynamic arguments, but complex dynamic processes also play a role. Scientists have a responsibility to ensure they provide accurate information to the media and public.

Loss and damage funds are intended to support low-income regions experiencing impacts of human-caused climate change. Currently, event attribution should only play a limited role in determining loss and damage spending, but this role could grow as the field advances.

The authors use chromophore-targeted laser photolysis to selectively kill pyramidal neurons that project from auditory cortex to the inferior colliculus. They find that this eliminates the experience-dependent recalibration of sound localization, while leaving normal sound localization intact, implicating this pathway in learning-induced plasticity.

Limiting warming to 1.5 °C is expected to lessen the risk of extreme events, relative to 2 °C. Considering Australia, this work shows a decrease of about 25% in the likelihood of record heat, both air and sea surface, if warming is limited to 1.5 °C.

Much of Australia has been in severe drought since at least 2017. Here we link Australian droughts to the absence of Pacific and Indian Ocean mode states that act as key drivers of drought-breaking rains. Predicting the impact of climate change on drought requires accurate modelling of these modes of variability.

It has been assumed that spatial patterns of warming are the same under transient and equilibrium scenarios. Analysis of a multi-model ensemble shows that this is not the case, with greater land warming for a transient state, increasing risks that need to be considered in adaptation planning.

The benefits of limiting global warming to the lower Paris Agreement target of 1.5 °C are substantial with respect to population exposure to heat, and should impel countries to strive towards greater emissions reductions.

A new study finds that neurons in the ferret frontal cortex typically respond to sound only during trained auditory tasks and that these neurons depict the task-related meaning rather than the acoustical properties of stimuli.

This study shows that auditory development is guided by multiple adaptive processes. This flexibility can help maintain accurate perception in different environments and provides a more unified account of developmental plasticity across species. The adaptive plasticity observed also provides insight into the nature of distributed neural representations underlying spatial hearing.

Primary auditory cortex is usually thought to be directly analogous to primary visual cortex, with stimulus physical properties being represented at this level. This perspective argues that the auditory system has unique operating principles that make it different from the visual system, such as considerably greater subcortical processing.

Since the Paris Agreement, the impacts of 1.5 and 2 °C global warming have been emphasized, but the rate of warming also has regional effects. A new framework of model experiments is needed to increase our understanding of climate stabilization and its impacts.

Current greenhouse gas emissions will continue to affect the climate even after we reach net-zero emissions. We must understand how and prepare for a cooling planet.