Koreans spin fire cans during “Jwibulnoli” a South Korean folk game at Han River on February 5, 2012 in Seoul, South Korea. The event is part of a “Daeboreum”, a Korean holiday that celebrates the first full moon of the lunar new year. (Photo by Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images)

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)

Tourists visit the Corral Canyon Cave in Malibu, Calif., Friday, May, 6, 2016. The cave, better known by the misleading moniker “Jim Morrison Cave” is now closed to the public until further notice. Large crowds have shown up on a daily basis to see the often vandalized cave and in some cases add to the vandalism with graffiti of their own. (Photo by Damian Dovarganes/AP Photo)

British soldiers inspect a captured German place in the Horseguards' Parade, London during World War I in November 1914, with the London Eye in the background as a reminder of just how much has changed in the last 100 years. (Photo by Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)

A Ka'apor Indian warrior (L) chases a logger who tried to escape after they captured him during a jungle expedition to search for and expel loggers from the Alto Turiacu Indian territory, near the Centro do Guilherme municipality in the northeast of Maranhao state in the Amazon basin, August 7, 2014. Tired of what they say is a lack of sufficient government assistance in keeping loggers off their land, the Ka'apor Indians, who along with four other tribes are the legal inhabitants and caretakers of the territory, have sent their warriors out to expel all loggers they find and set up monitoring camps in the areas that are being illegally exploited. (Photo by Lunae Parracho/Reuters)

A view of an entrance to the concrete case surrounding the pressure vessel of the reactor is seen inside the decommissioned Unit Six of the Greifswald nuclear power station outside Lubmin August 5, 2014. Unit Six was a part of East Germany's largest nuclear power plant that was nearly completed in 1990, when the country's re-unification halted construction. (Photo by Thomas Peter/Reuters)

An American Marine readies to land on Guadalcanal during the five-month struggle for the island between late 1942 and early 1943. Three thousand miles south of Tokyo, Guadalcanal was a major shipping point for military supplies. The Allied victory there in February, 1943, marked a major turning point in the war after a string of Japanese victories in the Pacific. (Photo by Joe Scherschel/Time & Life Pictures)