A Syrian boy plays with the head of a sacrificed sheep at a DIP camp for Interally Displaced Persons near the town of Aqrabat in Syria's northern Idlib province on August 12, 2019. Known as the “big” festival, Eid Al-Adha is celebrated each year by Muslims sacrificing various animals according to religious traditions, including cows, camels, goats and sheep. The festival marks the end of the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca and commemorates Prophet Abraham's readiness to sacrifice his son to show obedience to God. (Photo by Aaref Watad/AFP Photo)

Children play underneath Jacaranda trees lining a street in the capital Harare, Zimbabwe, Friday, October 11, 2019. Zimbabwe now has the world's second highest inflation after Venezuela, according to International Monetary Fund figures. The economy has been on a downward spiral for more than a year as hopes fade that Mugabe's successor and former deputy, President Emmerson Mnangagwa, will deliver on his promises of prosperity. (Photo by Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi/AP Photo)

In this image released on September 22, Filipino-American social media personality and singer Bella Poarch attends Rihanna's Savage X Fenty Show Vol. 3 presented by Amazon Prime Video at The Westin Bonaventure Hotel & Suites in Los Angeles, California; and broadcast on September 24, 2021. (Photo by Emma McIntyre/Getty Images for Rihanna's Savage X Fenty Show Vol. 3 Presented by Amazon Prime Video)

Fikiri Kiponda, left, and Wilson Saro, right, carry a green turtle that was unintentionally caught in a fisherman's net, before releasing it back into the Watamu National Marine Park on the Indian Ocean coast of Kenya Wednesday, September 22, 2021. A former accountant, Kiponda and the Local Ocean Conservation group rescue sea turtles that have been caught in fishermen's nets, and then release them back into the marine park or treat injured ones at a rescue center until they are fit. (Photo by Brian Inganga/AP Photo)

This picture taken on January 12, 2014 shows pet dogs, a yellow duck and a chicken in a skiing resort for a skiing competition in Sanmenxia, north China's Henan province. A tortoise beat a rabbit in a skiing competition held for pets and their owners in northern China, a report said on January 14. Cats and dogs faced off against a menagerie including a rooster and a yellow duck in a race to the finish line on snowy slopes in China's Hebei province, the state-run China News Service said. (Photo by AFP Photo)

“NASA's Pathfinder, Pathfinder Plus, Centurion and Helios Prototype were an evolutionary series of solar- and fuel-cell-system-powered unmanned aerial vehicles. AeroVironment, Inc. developed the vehicles under NASA's Environmental Research Aircraft and Sensor Technology (ERAST) program. They were built to develop the technologies that would allow long-term, high-altitude aircraft to serve as “atmospheric satellites”, to perform atmospheric research tasks as well as serve as communications platforms”. – Wikipedia

Photo: The solar-electric Helios Prototype flying wing is flies over the Hawaiian islands of Niihau and Lehua during the first solar-powered test flight July 14, 2001 from the U.S. Navy's Pacific Missile Range Facility on Kauai, HI. The 18-hour flight was a functional checkout of the aircraft's systems and performance in preparation for an attempt to reach sustained flight at 100,000 feet altitude later in the summer. (Photo Courtesy of NASA/Getty Images)

A boat, center, is surrounded by Japan Cost Guard's patrol boats after some activists descended from the boat on Uotsuri Island, one of the islands of Senkaku in Japanese and Diaoyu in Chinese, in East China Sea Wednesday, Aug. 15, 2012. Regional tensions flared on the emotional anniversary of Japan's World War II surrender as activists from China and South Korea used Wednesday's occasion to press rival territorial claims, prompting 14 arrests by Japanese authorities. The 14 people had traveled by boat from Hong Kong to the disputed islands controlled by Japan but also claimed by China and Taiwan. (Photo by Yomiuri Shimbun/Masataka Morita/AP 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)