A tourist is seen at the Caka Salt Lake in Wulan County, northwest China's Qinghai Province, September 4, 2020. (Photo by Zhang Long/Xinhua News Agency)

Trinidadian rapper Nicki Minaj poses at the Met Gala, an annual fundraising gala held for the benefit of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute with this year's theme “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion” in New York City, New York, U.S., May 6, 2024. (Photo by Andrew Kelly/Reuters)

In a simpler time all a child or an adult needed to enjoy the outdoors was a ball and a stick. Or maybe an old tire tied to a high branch to fashion a swing. And the only instruction given to children was to “be home before dark”. Now there are iPads and computers and television screens and shrinking safe public spaces. But despite the distractions and limitations of space, these images show the charm of kicking a ball or skipping rope endures. Sometimes with modifications as a nod to changing times. Here: in this Saturday, June 20, 2015 photo, a boy runs while playing with a motorcycle wheel in Samugari, Ayacucho, Peru. (Photo by Rodrigo Abd/AP Photo)

A police officer detains a woman on suspicion of collaborating with the 18th street gang during a "Safe House" operation at the Concepcion neighbourhood in San Salvador, July 2, 2015. Salvadoran police make “Safe House” operations at dangerous neighbourhoods of the capital to prevent murders, according to local media. (Photo by Jose Cabezas/Reuters)

It would seem to be something you'd see only in a cartoon or at a Phish concert, but according to park rangers in New South Wales, Australia, dozens of giant, fluorescent pink slugs have been popping up on a mountaintop there. The eight-inch creatures have been spotted only on Mount Kaputar, a 5,000-foot peak in the Nandewar Range in northern New South Wales. Scientists believe the eye-catching organisms are survivors from an era when Australia was home to rainforests. A series of volcanoes, millions of years of erosion and other geological changes “have carved a dramatic landscape at Mount Kaputar”, the park service wrote on its Facebook page, and unique arid conditions spared the slugs from extinction. (Photo by Michael Murphy/AFP Photo/NSW Environment Office)

English reality television personality and country music singer Megan Elizabeth McKenna is seen at Soho House on May 24, 2018 in London, United Kingdom. (Photo by Splash News and Pictures)

Indian men sleep in the shadow of an overflowing cloth container of hay, to be used as animal fodder, on a truck on a hot summer day in Ajmer in the western state of Rajasthan on May 30, 2018. (Photo by Shaukat Ahmed/AFP Photo)

The competition is run by Royal Observatory Greenwich sponsored by Insight Investment and in association with BBC Sky at Night Magazine. This year astrophotographers from 91 countries sent in more than 4,200 spectacular entries. Here: The Milky Way rises above an isolated lighthouse in Tasmania. Shot by James Stone of Australia. (Photo by James Stone/Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2018)