Armed Karo herdsman just back from protecting their cattle herds come down to the river to wash decorative clay markings off their bodies at the end of the day in the Omo Valley, South West Ethiopia. Dus, Omo Valley, Ethiopia, January 2008. (Photo by Brent Stirton/Discovery Communications)

An adult chimp plays with a young chimp at Chimp Haven in Keithville, La., Monday, February 18, 2013. One hundred and eleven chimpanzees will be coming from a south Louisiana laboratory to Chimp Haven, the national sanctuary for chimpanzees retired from federal research. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

In this July 24, 2016 photo, a pilgrim takes a bath in a sacred mud pool during the annual Voodoo celebration in Plaine-du-Nord, Haiti, Saturday, July 23, 2016. Pilgrims come to bathe in the mud and make offerings expecting a miracle. (Photo by Dieu Nalio Chery/AP Photo)

Birds congregate by the ocean at sunrise, after California’s governor said he would impose some of the nation’s strictest stay-at-home orders in the coming days, as the global outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) continues, in Santa Monica, California, U.S., December 4, 2020. (Photo by Lucy Nicholson/Reuters)

A blue tit comes face to face with its reflection in a car wing mirror in east Yorkshire in the last decade of July 2022. The photographer said: “I sat watching this little blue tit for 30 minutes as it fought with its own reflection”. (Photo by Dave Newman/Solent News)

A cow decorated with charms, colorful ropes and beads is seen as the local cattle breeders who prepared sash, loincloth and their local clothes known as “bush vest” before coming to plateau, their animals in Trabzon, Turkiye on September 24, 2023. (Photo by Hakan Burak Altunoz/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

A university in the Philippines in March 2024 has come up with a novel way to stop students cheating in exams – by getting them to wear hats in the shape of animated characters and random objects such as a crate of beer. (Photo by Angelo Ebora/beampix/Solent news)

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)