Mariner is an old codger. The wiring between his brain and his mouth is damaged. Consequently, he cannot recall words, especially nouns and names of things if the mouth is asking for them – the brain knows but won’t tell until five minutes later when he doesn’t need the word anymore. On the other hand, when he is typing, he has almost his entire lexicon at hand; words fall in as needed and he can manipulate meanings with unending suffixes and metaphors.

It doesn’t help that mariner can’t hear other people’s words, either. He wears hearing aids.

Mariner was poking around on the Internet looking for information about his issue. He was familiar with the general explorations of language as a deep survival skill and as a social skill as well. Just as with whales and many birds, humans have a brain that, when as young toddlers, the brain is quite adept at associating meaning with a given sound.

The following two paragraphs are from science journals. The topic is about the anatomical science of hearing and its chemical processes.

The investigation of organometallic compounds containing unsupported homoatomic metal-metal (M-M) bonds has been an area of major interest for decades. These compounds feature distinct, otherwise inaccessible bonding, such as M-M quadruple and quintuple bonds, and fascinating reactivity, including mimicking the reactions of C-C multiple bonds. Ultimately, the main driver for research in this area is to push the boundaries of bonding for a given element and, in doing so, rewrite the textbooks. On page 1147 of this issue, Boronski et al. (1) report the isolation of diberyllocene as the latest entrant in the field. Diberyllocene is a stable Be-Be bonded compound and is a relatively accessible source of nucleophilic beryllium, which has the potential to unlock the reactivity of organoberyllium with a vast array of new substrates.

Astrocytes are intimately associated with neurons and participate in a host of essential roles that facilitate synaptic transmission and circuit function. In neurons, heightened activity induces the expression of “immediate early genes,” which are predominately transcription factors that modify gene expression programs and activity-dependent epigenomic states, ultimately regulating circuit activity, plasticity, and associated behavioral outputs. However, whether heightened neuronal activity induces an analogous immediate early gene–like response in mature astrocytes and how this sculpts astrocytic transcriptional and epigenomic responses to regulate circuit function remain unclear.

Isn’t knowledge wonderful?

Ancient Mariner