Kaden Bringsplenty brings his horse to the starting line as Native Americans from all over the United States participate in an Indian relay race over Memorial Day weekend at the Osage County Fairgrounds in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, U.S. May 30, 2021. (Photo by Stephanie Keith/Reuters)

A member of p*ssy Riot performs in the nationwide Women's March, held after Texas rolled out a near-total ban on abortion procedures and access to abortion-inducing medications, in Austin, Texas, U.S., October 2, 2021. (Photo by Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters)

Smeared in colored powder fashionable women wearing sun glasses celebrate Holi, the Hindu festival of colors, in the Encino section of Los Angles on Sunday, March 24, 2024. (Photo by Richard Vogel/AP Photo)

Law enforcement clashes with demonstrators outside the Metropolitan Detention Center, MDC, in downtown Los Angeles, California on June 8, 2025. US President Donald Trump deployed 2,000 troops on June 7 to handle escalating protests against immigration enforcement raids in the Los Angeles area, a move the state's governor termed “purposefully inflammatory”. Federal agents clashed with angry crowds in a Los Angeles suburb as protests stretched into a second night Saturday, shooting flash-bang grenades and shutting part of a freeway amid raids on undocumented migrants, reports said. (Photo by Frederic J. Brown/AFP Photo)

A man uses a snow blower to clear a sidewalk during a winter storm ahead of the Christmas Holiday outside the Union Station, in Chicago on December 22, 2022. More than 2,200 flights were canceled across the United States by Thursday afternoon as a massive winter storm named Elliot upended holiday travel plans with a triple threat of heavy snow, howling winds and bitter cold (Photo by Kamil Krzaczynski/AFP Photo)

This picture taken on January 25, 2015 shows a participant taking part in an ice water challenge in Zhangjiajie, central China's Hunan province. Participants were required to stay in an ice pond, holding an ice block while eating ice-cream with an electric fan blowing at them. (Photo by AFP Photo/Stringer)

A devotee takes a holy bath at the Balaju Baise Dhara (22 water spouts) during the Baishak Asnan festival in Kathmandu April 4, 2015. Devotees believe that the water from these stone spouts, which is collected from the catchment area of the Nagarjun forest behind the spouts, will cure pains and skin diseases. (Photo by Navesh Chitrakar/Reuters)

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)