The Amazing Underwater Forest of Lake Kaindy
What makes Lake Kaindy truly remarkable is that it contains an underwater forest. Visible on the lakes surface are the tall, dried-out tops of submerged Spruce trees that rise above the water’s surface like the masts of sunken ships. They are the only sign of the amazing frozen forest below the water’s surface.
The water is so cold (even in summer the temperature does not exceed 6 degrees) that the pine needles remain on the trees, even after a hundred years of being submerged. During the winter, the lake freezes and becomes a popular spot for ice diving.
The lake is 400 meters long and is located in Kazakhstan’s portion of the Tian Shan Mountains, about 129 km from the city of Almaty. The lake was created after an earthquake in 1911 triggered a large landslide blocking the gorge and forming a natural dam.
Holy crap.
Celebrating the birth, death and enlightenment of Buddha. Happy Vesak Day!
Vesak is the major Buddhist festival of the year and celebrates the birth, enlightenment and death of Buddha all on the same day. Colourful lanterns adorn every home and luminous displays decorate the streets signifying the light of the Buddha.
More on Vesak Day by Somewhere in the world today…
Picture: Bathing Buddha by hkdigit, on Flickr
It’s hard to imagine something so simple could save a child’s life. But that’s exactly what this small device built on 3-D printer did. University of Michigan doctors designed and implanted the tracheal splint inside Kaiba Gionfriddo, now 20…
A young boy playing outside of a school in Nanyuki, Kenya. Classic home-made toy.
woot! Nanyuki!!!! tho you can barely tell from the picture :P
Soul-warmer of the day: Maira Kalman on happiness and the human condition. Pair with the equally wonderful Fail Safe.
“A series of hollowed-out television sets frame beguiling scenes imagined in Xiangxi’s works, begun while studying sculpture at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Art.
Situated in a small creative community in Hei Qiao Cun on the northeastern edge of the city, his studio is littered with second-hand appliances like washing machines, which become the sites of miniature worlds inspired by locations such as his old workspace in Guangzhou, the workers’ dormitory he once lived in, his parent’s sitting room, the interior of a train carriage—even his dream home. They are replicas rendered faithfully, but playfully, often using the cement, brick, glass, stone or paper materials found in their life-sized equivalents.”
Babies scare me more than anything. They’re tiny and fragile and impressionable—and someone else’s! As much as I hate borrowing stuff, that is how much I hate holding other people’s babies. It’s too much responsibility. Of course they are lovely and warm and adorable, and it’s so funny when they decide they like you and hold you in return, but I am frightened of doing something wrong that will alter them forever. Give them a weird look and they might be talking to their therapist about me fifty years later.
[…]
It might not be a fear of kids themselves, as in truth I usually get along with them pretty well. They like my tattoos and my uncomplicated child/adult face. They identify with my orange shoes. I look like I would let them get away with stuff, and I do. My fear of having children is that, frankly, I just don’t want to love anyone that much. I have my own problems with love, and I have processed and played the same games for a lifetime, but what if I had to do that with someone I actually MADE?! (Or went all the way to China and adopted. This is not a joke—I have long thought I would adopt one of those baby girls from China, because really, who’s going to know the difference?)
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From a 2011 Pew Research Center report, a graphic showing the median percentage of Muslims across seven Muslim countries who say each of these traits describes people in Western countries and median percentage of non-Muslims across the U.S., Russia, and four Western European countries who say each of these traits describes Muslims.
I highly recommend reading Michael Young’s op-ed “What Does Muslim-Western Relations Mean?” that gets at these ideas about values, characteristics, and identity.
~Trent Gilliss, senior editor
tedx:
Dr. Timothy Noakes has dedicated his life to uncovering the truth about health and exercise advice. At TEDxCapeTown, he explained how many of the popular recommendations and guidelines for how to be healthy — from diet advice to instructions for proper hydration — aren’t supported by even basic scientific research.
From his talk:
The [question] that I really got involved with in the 1980s was: Should we drinking more or less during exercise?
…In the 1960s, it was held that if you drank that actually if you drank during exercise, that wasn’t a very good idea. And Abebe Bikila, who was the first African runner to win two Olympic gold medals in the 1960 and the 1964 Olympic marathons, he ran both races without drinking anything.That was what runners did those days.
Then, all of a sudden, in the 1960s and 1970s, things changed and we were told that if you didn’t drink enough, you were going to die during exercise.
…In 1981, on the first of June, 1981, an athlete started the Comrades Marathon in Bourbon and she reached 70 km and her husband withdrew her from the race because she didn’t recognize him…within two hours, she was unconscious having epileptic seizures and she had to be taken to a hospital in Bourbon. And when she was admitted to hospital, she became the first case of this condition: [exercise-associated hyponatremic encephalopathy (EAHE)]… Her chest X-ray [showed] that [she had] fluid in her lungs and it took five days later before the fluid had gone out of her lungs.
…Over the next four or five years, we picked up a couple more cases and worked out that they had probably overdrunk and that — in other words — they’d [drank] too much during exercise … So the more you overdrink, the lower your sodium, and the sicker you were. And we published that in 1991, and thought, “That’s the end of the problem. We cured the problem. We know what causes it: it’s overdrinking.”
And we thought the problem would go away. But, unfortunately, at the same time that we were doing that, industry had come along and said, “No, actually, the more you drink, the better.”
…And we predicted what would happen. We predicted this would happen: The accumulative incidence of this condition, which had never existed before 1981, never existed — there were a total of 1,600 cases in the medical literature…and, tragically, 12 deaths. All completely avoidable.
And so what happened was that the sports drink industry came along and then they influenced the official drinking guidelines drawn up by official bodies. And those promoted overdrinking.
Then a lady died in the Boston Marathon in 2002, and in 2003 I was invited by two organizations to produce alternate drinking guidelines, which promoted drinking to thirst, and that finally has now been accepted that that is the way we should be drinking.
…The “science of hydration” is utterly bogus. There is no science to it. It was dreamed up by marketers to sell a product.
For more of Dr. Noakes’s research into health and exercise claims, watch his entire talk “Challenging the myths of good health” below:
J. Scott Campbell has once again OUT DONE himself with the coolest Disney Art I have seen!
loving it <3
(via kitchikishangout)
Please watch this gorgeous video of a washcloth being wrung out in space.
Minimal Posters - Five Great Mathematicians And Their Contributions.
(via wnycradiolab)
“I’m sad.”
“OK. I’ll lick you until you’re not sad.”
“…OK.”
(Source: dailyanimals, via kitchikishangout)
