Nightswimming

Apparently you read my blog, so hello!  I'll tell you how i do the belly thing in a bit.

Anyway, i had virtually abandoned this, but i'm back.  In about two days' time, the Other Channel will reach half a million views, which is nice-ish.  In the meantime, i've uploaded three videos to the pregnancy vlog and also plan to make a slideshow about how it might be achieved.  Also, i've had plenty of new video ideas for the "main" channel, one of which i've just finished off:

Actually, i haven't just finished this off because for some reason blogger went all weird and wouldn't let me post any of my own videos, so it's now been several days.  Here's the doobly-do:


Click to tweet: http://clicktotweet.com/cam7P .  Humans are unusually hairless and fat for apes.  This and a number of other features led Elaine Morgan to hold that in the relatively recent past our ancestors were partly aquatic.  There's a whole list of features which suggest this:

* Like aquatic mammals, we lack hair - seals, whales, elephants, hippos, manatees and dugongs for example.
* We stand upright, like other apes when they enter the water.
* Our bodies are insulated using fat rather than hair, which is also true of aquatic mammals, where it also provides buoyancy.
* We have breasts like dugongs, which are aquatic mammals.
* Unlike other land mammals, we have a diving reflex where our respiration and heart rate slow down when we are underwater.
* We have good breath control, which enables us to speak.
* Our nostrils face downwards, like the Proboscis Monkey which is semi-aquatic.
* We have a hymen which protects the reproductive system from debris - this is a less popular idea than the others.
* We make love face to face, like aquatic mammals, for instance whales.
* Our genome lacks an endogenous retrovirus which entered all other African primate genomes several million years ago, suggesting that we were not in Africa at the time.
* The oldest hominin fossils are found nearest the coast and newer ones gradually move inland.
* The oldest stone tools are made of pebbles rather than the irregular stones more likely to be found away from water.

The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis (or theory - the endogenous retrovirus is good evidence that we were at least not in Africa when that happened, and we weren't in Asia either so the possibilities are very limited) is not widely accepted among palaeoanthropologists for various reasons.  It is seen as feminist, it is not published widely in peer-reviewed journals and it is seen as an individual explanation for a wide variety of phenomena.  However, taking a Kuhnian and pro-feminist view, this reflects the tendency for established academics to hold on to power with respect to beliefs and accepted practices in the scientific community.  This reflects my experience in academia.

Desmond Morris and David Attenborough are both proponents of this theory and it is difficult to break into publishing in any area, including academia.

In fact, i think i'll add to some of the others.  This:

won't post, apparently.  There's also a great long rambling video on the periodic table which i've divided into two.  See if that posts:

Yep.  Right, now this gets me where i want to be since i want to add stuff which is new, namely on the Etruscan language.  The claim that Etruscan used "el-em-en" to mean "letter" as in letter of the alphabet, as it was LMN, like ABC, seems to have no historical basis at all.  There was at some point an idea that the Etruscan alphabet split down the middle.  In fact, it runs as follows:

This would split the Etruscan LMN at N.  Incidentally, the English alphabet, which is descended from the Etruscan, is divided into three groups of eight, so it's not entirely unfeasible, but it seems not to be true.

Etruscan fascinates me.  It's close to being a linguistic isolate like Basque is.  However, it now turns out that it was related to Lemnian, spoken on an island near Asia Minor, and Raetic, spoken in an area which is now part of Switzerland.  All of these may be related to Minoan as well.  Nonetheless, it is clearly unrelated to Indo-European languages and may not even be Nostratic (if Nostratic even exists).

On to today's callouts, at long last, and once again it can't be posted.  Suffice it to say, then, that i've made a callout video for danlacuna, jeremyhansen100, skateman70 and Tasarla Skaara.

The Name's Bond. Atomic Bond

That's not a song title, is it?  Ah well.

Two videos today.  Here's one:

Click to tweet:  http://clicktotweet.com/Tl9rK .

Antibiotic resistance is a growing problem, to the extent that in a couple of decades it's likely to become impractical to do things which increase the risk of infection safely, like treat cancer and transplant organs, or even carry out hip replacements, because of the risk of infection from bacteria such as Klebsiella, E. coli O157 and MRSA.  This is because bacteria evolve resistance to antibiotics.

There are a number of possible answers to this.  One is to use more complex mixtures to deal with infections, for instance herbal remedies and essential oils.  Echinacea would be one example, though i'm not keen.  Herbal remedies and essential oils which are antibacterial usually contain a wide variety of different compounds which address the issue in different ways.  Resistance to one of those compounds is unlikely to work against another, and as a result, bacteria are unlikely to evolve resistance.  The hundreds of millions of years over which plant and other resistance to infection has evolved means that it is a tested and reliable technique to avoid infection.

A second approach is bacteriophage therapy.  Viruses exist which kill bacteria by injecting their DNA into them and, as is usual with viruses, use the cells' machinery to replicate themselves at a cost to the cell, in this case the death of the bacterial cell.  Again, resistance does not develop to these because they are locked in an evolutionary arms race.

Apart from these possibilities, bacteria can be prevented from infecting by increasing the body's mechanical resistance to their incursion, for instance by increasing the strength of mucous membranes and maintaining outward flow of fluids such as urine, tears and sweat.

Finally, the variety of drugs developed by the pharmaceutical industry is usually very narrow and the same applies to antibiotics.  Many antibiotics are modelled on fungal compounds, and while these are effective at killing a wide variety of bacteria, they are less effective at killing other fungi and as a result the ecosystem of the body undergoes invasion from fungi such as thrush when they are used.  A whole world of variety exists out there which has yet to be exploited.

And this one:

Click to tweet:  http://clicktotweet.com/59Edj

A rather cynical and jaded video about the characteristics of different types of chemical bond for GCSE Chemistry.

Ionic bonds are between positively and negatively charged ions such as in sodium chloride (table salt).  When an electron shell is close to empty or full, it avidly seeks electrons to redress the energy state of its outermost orbital.  Examples are found among the halogens and alkali metals, such as sodium, potassium, chlorine and fluorine.  Ionic compounds are not really made of molecules but are instead atoms of elements closely bonded to each other.  Because their bonds are strong, they have high melting points and tend to be solid at room temperature.  They are readily soluble in water, forming solutions which conduct electricity, but are good insulators.  One of the elements in an ionic compound is a metal and one a non-metal.

Covalent compounds share electrons, examples being water and carbon dioxide.  They form between non-metallic elements.  They form real molecules between which the bonds are weak, and so they have lower melting points than ionic compounds.  Their solutions do not conduct electricity and they are relatively insoluble.

Metallic bonds are where electrons become delocalised and as a result they confer various distinctive properties on metals:  lustre, malleability, sonorousness and hardness.

I also cover allotropy in this.  Graphite and diamond are two allotropes of carbon.  Graphite consists of sheets of hexagonal arrangements of atoms which are strongly bonded within the sheets but not between them.  It conducts electricity fairly well because of the straight routes along which electrons can move.  Diamond, on the other hand, is tetrahedrally arranged and therefore very hard but does not conduct electricity well.

Other examples of allotropy are red and white phosphorus.

The first one was done in a tearing hurry, hence the bits of paper rather than slideshow-type inserts.  If i'd edited them in, it would've taken too long.  The second one was a bit more finessed, except that the whole over-simplification thing is really doing me 'ead in.  I also think i might have got some things honestly wrong.

A few pics from the second vid:

Nice picture of sodium fluoride from Wikipedia.

Graphite.  Made me think of buckyballs and nanotubes.

Two allotropes of phosphorus, which has oddly and coincidentally turned out to look like the Becoming YouTube thumbnails.