A boy jumps over a puddle of water on the outskirts of Havana, Cuba March 21, 2016. (Photo by Ueslei Marcelino/Reuters)

Men throw water on a woman as part of traditional Easter celebrations in Szenna, Hungary, March 28, 2016. (Photo by Laszlo Balogh/Reuters)

Young girls carry containers filled with drinking water beside the railway station in Agartala, India, April 20, 2016. (Photo by Jayanta Dey/Reuters)

A tiger plays in water at a tiger zoo in Chaing Mai, Thailand on March 31, 2021. (Photo by Soe Zeya Tun/Reuters)

A jockey rides a water buffalo during the annual Chonburi Buffalo Race in Chonburi on October 1, 2020. (Photo by Mladen Antonov/AFP Photo)

Revellers react in a water fight during Songkran Festival celebrations, in Hong Kong, China on April 9, 2023. (Photo by Lam Yik/Reuters)

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)

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)