Audiological evaluation of infants using mother's voice.

Objectives: Hearing loss is a serious problem in infants and children because it may interfere with the development of typical speech, verbal language, and auditory and communication skills. By measuring hearing ability (thresholds) as early as possible, even as early as during infancy, effective treatment can be administered. These treatments may significantly reduce the handicap associated with hearing loss.

Multiferroic Phases and Transitions in Ferroelectric Lead Titanate Nanodots.

Discovery of novel phases and their associated transitions in low-dimensional nanoscale systems is of central interest as the origin of emergent phenomena and new device paradigms. Although typical ferroelectrics such as PbTiO exhibit diverse phase transition sequences, the conventional incompatible mechanisms of ferroelectricity and magnetism keep them as simply nonmagnetic phases, despite the immense practical prospective of multiferroics in novel functional devices. Here, we demonstrate using density function theory that PbTiO nanodots exhibit unconventional multiferroic phase transitions.

Unusual Multiferroic Phase Transitions in PbTiO Nanowires.

Unconventional phases and their transitions in nanoscale systems are recognized as an intriguing avenue for both unique physical properties and novel technological paradigms. Although the multiferroic phase has attracted considerable attention due to the coexistence and cross-coupling of electric and magnetic order parameters, mutually exclusive mechanism between ferroelectricity and ferromagnetism leaves conventional ferroelectrics such as PbTiO simply nonmagnetic. Here, we demonstrate from first-principles that ultrathin PbTiO nanowires exhibit unconventional multiferroic phases with emerging ferromagnetism and coexisting ferroelectric/ferrotoroidic ordering.