Mysteries in Lake Natron: Turning Animals into Stones

Lake Natron in Tanzania is a standout amongst the most quiet lakes in Africa, but at the same time it's the wellspring of the absolute most phantasmagorical photos ever caught — pictures that look as if living creatures had right away swung to stone.

The antacid water in Lake Natron has a pH as high as 10.5 and is so acidic it can blaze the skin and eyes of creatures that aren't adjusted to it. The water's alkalinity originates from the sodium carbonate and different minerals that stream into the lake from the encompassing slopes. What's more, stores of sodium carbonate — which was once utilized as a part of Egyptian embalmment — additionally goes about as an awesome kind of additive for those creatures sufficiently unfortunate to kick the bucket in the waters of Lake Natron.

Regardless of some media reports, the creature didn't just swing to stone and kick the bucket in the wake of coming into contact with the lake's water. Truth be told, Lake Natron's basic waters bolster a flourishing biological community of salt swamps, freshwater wetlands, flamingos and other wetland flying creatures, tilapia and the green growth on which expansive herds of flamingos food. Presently, picture taker Scratch Brandt has caught frequenting pictures of the lake and its dead in a book titled "Over the Assaulted Land" (Abrams Books, 2013).


Brandt found the remaining parts of flamingos and different creatures with pale sodium carbonate stores plotting their bodies in sharp alleviation. "I surprisingly discovered the animals — all way of winged creatures and bats — cleaned up along the shoreline of Lake Natron," Brandt wrote in his book. "Nobody knows for certain precisely how beyond words, … the water has a greatly high pop and salt substance, so high that it would strip the ink off my Kodak film boxes inside of a few moments.

"I took these creatures as I found them on the shoreline, and then placed them in 'living' positions, bringing them back to 'life,' as it were," Brandt wrote, referring to the way he repositioned the animals. "Reanimated, alive again in death."

Amid rearing season, more than 2 million lesser flamingos (Phoenicopterus minor) utilize the shallow lake as their essential reproducing ground in Africa. The flamingos' homes are based on little islands that shape in the lake amid the dry season.

Lake Natron is one of two basic lakes around there of East Africa; the other is Lake Bahi. Both are terminal lakes that don't deplete out to any stream or ocean; they are encouraged by hot springs and little waterways. As shallow lakes in a hot atmosphere, their water temperatures can achieve as high as 106 degrees Fahrenheit (41 degrees Celsius).

The tranquility of Lake Natron — and its flamingo populace — are undermined by a proposed hydroelectric force plant on the Ewaso Ngiro Stream, the primary waterway sustaining the lake. As confined as the lake seems to be (it wasn't even found by Europeans until 1954), there are no insurances set up for the lake or its undermined flamingo population.

Here are some photos of clacified animals in Lake Natron taken by the photographer Nick Brandt :

Calcified Dove

Calcified fish eagle

Calcified Songbird

Calcified Swallow

Sexercise?

Sexercise? Getting Laid Burns Calories, according to study.. 

Does sex count as exercise? Good news: It might.

A new study finds that, in young people, sex burns an average of 4.2 calories a minute for men and 3.1 calories a minute for women. That intensity is moderate, the researchers reported online Oct. 24 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE. In other words, sex is better exercise than a walk, but not quite as good as a jog.

"These results suggest that sexual activity may potentially be considered, at times, as a significant exercise," the researchers wrote.

Sex as exercise?

Whether sex gets to count as a workout is a long-debated topic. A popular myth holds that a typical session of sex burns between 100 and 300 calories, but no one has ever directly measured the calories burned.  

A few brave couples have had sex for science, however. Famed sex researchers William Masters and Virginia Johnson observed couples having sex and noted that heart rates reached as high as 180 beats per minute. For comparison, between 85 and 119 beats per minute count as moderate-intensity exercise for a 50-year-old. 

In 1984, a study of 10 intrepid married couples published in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine used heart rate and blood pressure monitoring, a fast-responding oxygen gas analyzer and electrocardiography to determine that, for men, self-stimulation increased heart rate by 37 percent. Man-on-top sex increased it by 51 percent.

One problem with these studies, however, is that the couples had to get busy in the lab, hooked up to wires and tubes — imagine the difficulty of reproducing a, ahem, typical sex session. Fortunately, new technology provides a way around this monitoring problem.

Using a wearable armband called SenseWear, University of Quebec at Montreal researchers tracked the energy expenditures of couples as they had sex in their homes. The researchers recruited 21 heterosexual couples ages 18 to 35, choosing to focus on young people because energy expenditures vary widely across age.

Each person first completed a 30-minute moderate-intensity treadmill workout to provide a baseline measure of their calorie expenditure during exertion. They were then sent home with armbands and instructions to have sex four times over the course of the next month while wearing the sensors.

The SenseWear bands use accelerometers, temperature sensors and galvanic skin response sensors to come up with an accurate measurement of calories expended. Galvanic skin response refers to an increase of electrical conductivity that occurs when a person sweats.

Let's get physical

The recorded sex sessions lasted for an average of 24.7 minutes, with the shortest lasting 10 minutes and the longest stretching out over 57 minutes. Men expended more energy getting busy than women, even after controlling for men's greater body mass. On average, a sexual encounter cost men 101 calories, or 4.2 calories per minute. That's compared with 276 calories, or 9.2 per minute, on the treadmill.

Women expended an average of 69 calories during a session of sex, averaging 3.1 calories per minute. Again, the numbers weren't as high as a sweat-it-out session on the treadmill, during which women expended an average of 213 calories, or 7.1 per minute.

Still, the researchers said, people found sex pleasant (duh) and thus might be more likely to get horizontal than to schlep to the gym. Sex may also be a better way to burn calories than housework, though more research is needed: A study released in October in the journal BMC Public Health found that people overestimated how many calories they were burning while sweeping floors and vacuuming.

Source: http://www.livescience.com/40721-sex-exercise-burns-calories.html