Visitors outside the venue for Seoul fashion week in Seoul, South Korea on September 3, 2024. (Photo by Lee Jin-man/AP Photo)

A woman and her child wade through flood waters in Feni on August 22, 2024. Floods triggered by torrential rains have swamped a swath of low-lying Bangladesh, disaster officials said on August 22, adding to the new government's challenges after weeks of political turmoil. (Photo by Zakir Hossain Chowdhury/AFP Photo)

Most people know Nikon as a purveyor of pro and consumer-grade digital cameras. But the company's expertise with optics bleeds over into related markets – it's one of the science community's major suppliers of microscopes. And each year the company asks the community to send it some of their favorite images of tiny objects. A panel of scientists and journalists have chosen the best of this past year's submissions, which Nikon has placed on its Small World site.

Photo: Honorable Mention. “Snow crystal, illuminated with colored lights (5x)”. (Photo by Dr. Kenneth Libbrecht, California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Department of Physics, Pasadena, California, USA)

The first load of passengers queuing for the Bennie Railplane in Glasgow; the inventor George Bennie is third in the queue. The streamlined cars are self propelled, driven by air screws in front and behind, and hang from a steel girder. (Photo by J. A. Hampton/Topical Press Agency/Getty Images). 4th July 1930

A Typhoon jet flown by Flt Lt Jim Peterson practising over RAF Coningsby in the East Lindsey district of Lincolnshire, England on September 27, 2019 producing a rainbow effect over the plane. The rainbow is made of crystalized or frozen water vapor that reflect and refract sunlight, causing the rainbow effect. (Photo by Claire Hartley/Bav Media)

Soyuz MS-12 spacecraft with crew members of Expedition 59/60 Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin, NASA astronauts Christina Koch and Nick Hague lifts off from the launch pad at the Russian leased Baikonur cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, 15 March 2019. Hague, Koch, and Ovchinin will spend six-and-a-half months living and working aboard the International Space Station. (Photo by Sergei Ilnitsky/EPA/EFE)

In this April 13, 2018 photo, motorcycle taxi driver Ricardo Medina, 60, transports vegetable vender Rigoberto Herrera Mendez, left, and coconut vendor Osvaldo Ochoa in Campo Florido, east of Havana, Cuba. The three men expressed hope that new government leadership will improve things, saying the country cannot move backwards. “We survive life with our work”, said Medina. (Photo by Ramon Espinosa/AP Photo)

A Russian service member stands next to an acquaintance during preparations ahead of the Victory Day parade in Moscow, Russia on May 9, 2024. (Photo by Maxim Shemetov/Reuters)