Hearing-impaired children may regain some hearing thanks to a gene therapy breakthrough,reports Science. Since October, there have been news of children who had been born without the ability to hear and have started hearing: One from Morocco who was treated by Eli Lilly and five from China, according to The Lancet. Updates from two other teams working on the gene therapy are expected next week at the Annual Association for Research in Otolaryngology meeting, says the article.

The treatment acts as the missing puzzle piece. The therapy employstwo harmless viruses that carry parts of the OTOF gene which are injected into the subject’s cochlea, explains the MIT Technology Review. In there, the hairlike cells that transmit sound reside but are inactive, as Otoferlin, the protein that links the transmission of sound and relays it to our brains, is missing. When the virus begins to work, that link is restored because it releases the missing protein, and hey presto, the individual should be able to hear.

But there’s still a long way to go: While the therapy is groundbreaking, it’s not going to work for everyone. First, subjects have to already have hair cells in their ears for the gene to be able to work — and that’s likely to be the case for trials conducted over the next few years. Novartis (unsuccessfully) tried to figure out a way to regenerate these hair cells in adults who had lost them. More recently, Frequency Therapeutics tried to do the same but also fell short of a breakthrough. More than 100 genes can be responsible for hearing loss, so there is no one-size-fits-all treatment.

There are some caveats for children too: For one, human brains can’t learn to interpret speech after the age of five, which means that the Moroccan boy from Eli Lilly’s study could technically hear frequencies but wasn’t able to understand them, says the New York Times. For the children in China, however, who had partial hearing, some with cochlear implants, were able to improve their hearing and speech.

The future is still uncertain: It’s still too early to tell just how much these children’s understanding of speech will improve and for how long, says Lawrence Lustig, a gene therapist at Columbia University quoted in Science. It’s also possible that gene expression could dwindle or the body could fight off the ear’s response, scientists add.

The hope is that newborns who fail hearing tests could quickly be tested for the OTOF mutation and be treated as soon as possible. Some researchers even hope to treat inherited hearing difficulty prenatally, if they are able to conduct fetal genetic testing. This would be a big development here in Egypt, if it becomes readily available, where 4.2% of our population is hearing impaired.

This probably isn’t the kind of information you want to hear (or read), but we probably don’t know the healthy limit to our caffeine intake. Ingesting a dangerous dose of caffeine is unlikely from just a few cups of coffee, but our favorite addiction has inspired products that are easily accessible and equally life-threatening, according to The Atlantic. These products deliver high doses of caffeine that can result in caffeinism — a state of intoxication that may have dangerous side effects, such as seizures, tachycardia, or even death.

The concerning development? Caffeine is now being made readily available in massive doses, and in slightly questionable formats.

Take high-caffeine energy drinks, for example. These beverages have long been under scrutiny for their adverse health benefits,but newer entries to the market pose an even greater threat. Last year, the American café chain Panera launched Charged Lemonade — an ultra-caffeinated drink that contains four times the amount of a regular cup of coffee and has, so far, allegedly caused two deaths and permanent heart problems in consumers.

And don’t get us started on snortable coffee: The turn of the year saw the rise of snortablecaffeine. This product, which was sold on Amazon, and has struggled to keep up with demand since its launch, and describes itself as an energy supplement. There is even a nasal spray, Turbo Snort, that promises to deliver 400 hours of energy and is available for purchase.

This consumption of caffeine is alarming and dangerous: Aside from normalizing the use of hard drugs through its packaging, medical professionals worry it’s easy to overconsume. Caffeine ingested through food and drinks are slower to absorb, giving a slow release of energy. People indulging in snortable caffeine won’t be able to gauge how much they’ve consumed, making them more susceptible to caffeinism-induced complications.

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