Heat rising from the pavement distorts the view looking east on Pennsylvania Avenue NW toward the U.S. Capitol as a heat wave intensifies across the Eastern United States on June 18, 2024, in Washington, DC. (Photo by Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)

A rose chafer in Oxfordshire, UK on July 8, 2024. The beetles are often seen on flowers in the garden and are sometimes maligned for munching their way through these plants. However, they are an important detritivore as they feed on dead and decaying matter and recycle its nutrients, which makes a helpful addition to any compost. (Photo by Geoffrey Swaine/Rex Features/Shutterstock)

Dressed up participants run at the “Course de la Marmite” during the 46th Escalade Race (Course de l'Escalade) in Geneva, Switzerland, 07 December 2024. (Photo by Martial Trezzini/EPA/EFE)

Actors Patrick Brammall and Anne Hathaway seen on the set of “The Devil Wears Prada 2” in Brooklyn on August 05, 2025 in New York City. (Photo by Aeon/GC Images)

Logan Edra of the United States, known as Logistx, competes in the Women's Breaking dance Round robin of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games at La Concorde in Paris, on August 9, 2024. (Photo by Angelika Warmuth/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)

A boat commutes across the Mekong river in Phnom Penh on August 8, 2014. The Mekong is the world's twelth longest river running from the Tibetan Plateau through China's Yunnan province, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam. (Photo by Tang Chhin Sothy/AFP Photo)

Shortlisted: Pooyan Shadpoor, Houcheraghi. While walking along the shore of Larak, Iran – an island in the Persian Gulf – Shadpoor came across this luminous scene. The “magical lights of (the) plankton ... enchanted me so that I snapped the shot”, he writes. (Photo by Pooyan Shadpoor/2016 EPOTY)