odditiesoflife:

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.

prostheticknowledge:

3D Printed Photographs

Instructables walkthrough from amandaghassaei on converting black and white photographs into 3D printed images complete with relief texture:

The 3d printer in our office (an Objet Connex500) prints with a rigid, semitransparent white material that can be used to create these unique black and white photographic prints.  These prints may be indecipherable when viewed from the side, but when backlit with a diffuse light, they recreate images with surprisingly high precision and even add some subtle dimensionality and texture to the scene.

By varying the thickness of a region of this semitransparent print you can control the amount of light that is able to pass through, thereby controlling the brightness (thinner regions of material will appear brighter and thicker regions darker).  In this project, I’ve mapped each individual greyscale pixel value of an image to thickness, allowing me to precisely reproduce any greyscale image.  The photos I’ve printed include an adorable picture my mom took of our cat Teddy (fig 4), Saturn and its moon Titan taken by the Cassini space probe (fig 5 and 6), and a huge print (19x16”) of Mt. Williamson by Ansel Adams (fig 1, 2, and 3).

Read how they were put together here

anime-backgrounds:

Nisemonogatari. Directed by Akiyuki Shinbo, created by Shaft Inc.

nprmusic:

Boards of Canada, “Reach for the Dead” from Tomorrow’s Harvest (out June 11).