Malian women and children represent the poorest as well as the most difficult to reach through written media. The interrelated practices of dancing, drumming, and storytelling transmit history, cultural beliefs, and current events for people who do not read and write. Researchers in the social sciences and officials for international aid organizations struggle with the circulation and reception of public health literature. They now recognize that native non-governmental organizations with staff that are fluent not only in the native languages but also in the social mores, better communicate with underserved populations through means other than billboards, pamphlets, or power-point presentations. The body, in both a general Western and Malian tradition, plays a particular role in how we come to know the world. This paper describes research conducted in Mali on female circumcision with international aid organizations, native NGOs, and independent human rights activists. Three interconnected areas form a triangular framework: how different research methods like dancing, drumming, storytelling, and soccer can offer valuable phenomenological insights to lived experience; the ethics of learning and listening to these various voices that transmit sexual health knowledge; and the ethics of engaging and disseminating such knowledge. The talking drums elicit new ways of seeing, being, and listening along with ethical ethnographic conundrums.

In this issue of EMBO Molecular Medicine, Decher et al (2017) identify a point mutation in the K2P2 (TREK‐1) potassium (K+) channel that changes function in just those ways expected to predispose to right ventricular outflow tract (RVOT) ventricular tachycardia (VT) in the patient they study. Whereas wild‐type channels are selective for K+ and inhibited by β‐adrenergic stimulation, mutant I267T channels pass sodium (Na+) into the cells, even during β‐adrenergic stimulation, and are more active in response to membrane stretch, changes predicted to enhance cardiac myocyte excitability. The report contributes to accumulating evidence for Na+ leak via K2P channels in association with normal development (Thomas et al, 2008), acquired arrhythmia (Ma et al, 2011), and now a missense mutation. Decher et al (2017) both inform and direct us toward interesting opportunities for further investigation.

This music score was submitted for the Kaleidoscope 2020 Call for Scores, an open access collaboration with the UCLA Music Library.

This music score was submitted for the Kaleidoscope 2020 Call for Scores, an open access collaboration with the UCLA Music Library.