A physically challenged girl looks at her brother as she is kept in a basin to seek alms from people on the street in Kano, Nigeria December 30, 2015. The girl has suffered from her condition since birth. (Photo by Reuters/Stringer)

These Northern Lights “rainbows” have turned the sky greener than the Earth below. Vitaly Istomin, 26, spent several nights in freezing conditions under the stars in northern Russia’s Khibiny Mountains to capture the aurora’s “rainbows”. (Photo by Vitaly Istomin/Caters News Agency)

Anything not recycled in industry is sold on stalls along the neighbouring highway in Sitakunda Beach, Bangladesh, February 2012. A look inside Bangladesh’s ship breaking yards reveal the brutal conditions workers are subjected to everyday. (Photo by Jan Møller Hansen/Barcroft Images)

Indian boy Hassan Malik works in a leather shoe factory at Topsia in Calcutta, eastern India, 19 November 2013. The leather industry occupies an important place in the Indian economy. It is an employment intensive sector with a vast potential for growth and exports but also a pollution intensive industry that relies on cheap labor. One of the major production centers for leather and leather products is located in Calcutta, West Bengal. Hundreds of tanneries are operated in the city’s Tiljala, Topsia and Tangra districts. They are mostly run by local families living and working under poor conditions. (Photo by Piyal Adhikary/EPA)

Migingo is a tiny 2,000-square-metre (0.49-acre; 0.20-hectare) island, about half the size of a football pitch, in Lake Victoria. Migingo is a tiny rock island, less than half-an-acre or about half the size of a football field, located in Lake Victoria, the largest lake in Africa and the largest tropical lake in the world. Although tiny in size, the island is home to 131 people (according to 2009 census) living in crammed huts made of corrugated sheets and wood. Despite shabby living conditions, Migingo Island boasts of five bars, a beauty salon, a pharmacy as well as several hotels and numerous brothels.

Born with a rare condition, the artist has chronicled her life in portraits – capturing everything from her tattooed prosthetics to the tentacled creature she stitched together on the shores of Naoshima. Here: Ophelia (2013). From a series of photos of imagined women exhibited at the 2013 Aichi Triennale. Here, Katayama invokes Hamlet’s tragic heroine, after the painting by British pre-Raphaelite John Everett Millais. (Photo by Mari Katayama/The Guardian)

Underwater photographer Alexander Semenovs has snapped some of the most stunning, fragile life forms anywhere on planet Earth. Shot in deep, dark conditions, the images continue to provide an insight into what lies beneath, with glowing creatures appearing a lot like aliens in the pitch-black water. Semenovs has shot the likes of bioluminescent jellyfish, aggressive-looking worms and many species that leave a lot to the imagination. The 30-year-old from Moscow does the majority of his work in the White Sea, near the Arctic Circle. Here: A Comb jelly – Beroe cucumis. (Photo by Alexander Semenovs/Caters News)