Beautiful, strange and occasionally alarming pictures from the shortlist for this year’s Wellcome image awards – which celebrate the very best in science photography and imaging – from an x-ray of a bat to a micrograph of a kidney stone. The exhibition opens on 12 March at three science centres and the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester. Photo: Scanning electron micrograph (SEM) of an Arabidopsis thaliana flower, also commonly known as thale cress. Some of the anthers are open, revealing pollen grains ready for dispersal. Arabidopsis was the first plant to have its entire genome sequenced and is widely used as a model organism in molecular and plant biology. Horizontal width of image is 1200 microns. Magnification 100x. (Photo by Stefan Eberhard/Wellcome Images)

A man dressed as a “Trapajon”, representing entities of nature, poses for a picture after taking part in the Vijanera Festival in Silio, northern Spain, Sunday, Jan. 6, 2013. The Vijanera masquerade, of pre-Roman origin, is the first carnival of the year in Europe symbolizing the triumph of good over evil and involving the participation of crowds of residents wearing different masks, animal skins and brightly colored clothing with its own complex function and symbolism and becoming the living example of the survival of archaic cults to nature. (Photo by Daniel Ochoa de Olza/AP Photo)

Cara Delevingne and Kate Moss attend the Burberry Prorsum show during London Fashion Week Spring Summer 2015 on September 15, 2014 in London, England. (Photo by Anthony Harvey/Getty Images)

The crowd watches as stunt pilots Melissa Pemberton, Jurgis Kairys and Skip Stewart of The Immortals fly past pyrotechnics as they perform at The Australian International Airshow on March 1, 2015 in Avalon, Australia. (Photo by Scott E. Barbour/Getty Images)

A receptionist dinosaur robot performs at the new robot hotel, aptly called Henn na Hotel or Weird Hotel, in Sasebo, southwestern Japan, Wednesday, July 15, 2015. From the receptionist that does the check-in and check-out to the porter that’s a stand-on-wheels taking luggage up to the room, the hotel, that is run as part of Huis Ten Bosch amusement park, is “manned” almost totally by robots to save labor costs. (Photo by Shizuo Kambayashi/AP Photo)

A photo made avialable on 05 August 2015 shows an Indian woman collecting drinking water from a water pump in the submerged village of Sreerampur, some 150 kilometers north of Calcutta, India, on 04 August 2015. At least 215 people have died in floods and a landslide following monsoon rains in India over the past week, 83 deaths were reported from the western state of Gujarat and 69 from eastern West Bengal. The worst-affected states were West Bengal, Gujarat and Rajasthan, the Home Ministry said. (Photo by Piyal Adhikary/EPA)

In this photo taken Saturday, January 24, 2015, a child makes a face while having her photo taken with the snow covered slopes of the Nanshan ski resort behind her in Beijing. As Beijing makes a final push in its bid for the 2022 Winter Olympics, Chinese President Xi Jinping says winning the bid will encourage over 300 million Chinese to take up winter sports by 2022, according to state-run Xinhua News agency. (Photo by Ng Han Guan/AP Photo)

Elephants spray villagers with water in celebration of the Songkran water festival in Thailand's Ayutthaya province, north of Bangkok, April 10, 2015. The annual elephant Songkran is held to promote the tourism industry prior the Songkran Festival which is celebrated with splashing water and putting powder on each others faces as a symbolic sign of cleansing and washing away the sins from the old year. (Photo by Chaiwat Subprasom/Reuters)