A citizen wearing protective suit shops at a market in Santiago, Chile, April 16, 2020 Chile has taken stringent measures to contain the virus, including imposing a night time curfew, suspending classes, closing non-essential businesses, and mandating the use of face masks on all public transit. (Photo by Jorge Villegas/Xinhua News Agency)

A bride to be in the Grassmarket in Edinburgh, Scotland on Monday, April 26, 2021, as beer gardens, non-essential shops, restaurants and cafes, along with swimming pools, libraries and museums in Scotland reopen today after lockdown restrictions have eased. (Photo by Andrew Milligan/PA Images via Getty Images)

A worker sits as illegally harvested sandalwood confiscated by Kenya's multiagency security teams is set ablaze to curb the trade in their essential oil, which is extracted to manufacture medicines and cosmetics at the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) offices along Kiambu road in Nairobi, Kenya on February 28, 2023. (Photo by Monicah Mwangi/Reuters)

New York City is populated with millions of people that each serve as an essential piece of the city's eclectic pie. The Big Apple's offering of unique and diverse individuals is arguably unmatched. We always hear about what a melting pot this immense metropolis is with its endless supply of quirky characters and the ongoing photo series known as Humans of New York proves it.

Revelers celebrate New Years Eve in socially distanced pods at Times Square on December 31, 2020, in New York City. On average, about one million revelers are drawn to the Crossroads of the World to watch performances and celebrate the New Year. This year a limited live audience of about 40 first responders and essential workers will be allowed to watch the New Years' ball drop from a secure area in Times Square. (Photo by David Dee Delgado/Getty Images)

Shadow art is a unique form of sculptural art where the 2D shadows cast by a 3D sculpture are essential for the artistic effect.

Nowadays, crossbreeding and gene splicing are creating things that would never have occurred in nature. Thanks to gene splicing, modern man can witness mice that glow in the dark, goats that produce milk which is then used to make bulletproof vests, and even cows that produce milk that is almost identical to human breast milk. One of the latest feats of human genius is the creation of Thompson and Morgan. By combining the genes of tomatoes and potatoes they were able to create a “TomTato”, which is essentially a plant that grows tomatoes and potatoes at the same time. With creations such as this, the world’s hunger problem may be resolved in a few decades.

An open water swimmer surfaces as she enjoys a socially-distanced dawn swim after breaking the ice on the surface of a lake near Scunthorpe, northern England, January 9, 2021. Faced by a sharp rise in coronavirus infections, driven by the new strain, England entered a strict lockdown on January 5, 2021, with schools and non-essential shops closed for at least six weeks after previous measures failed to halt the steep rise in cases. (Photo by Lindsey Parnaby/AFP Photo)