A picture taken on October 17, 2014 in Vevey shows a giant fork designed by Switzerland's artist Jean-Pierre Zaugg to commemorate Nestle's Alimentarium Food Museum 10th anniversary. World's biggest food company, Swiss Nestle Group announced results sales down by 3.1% for the first nine months of 2014 to 66.2 billion Swiss francs (55.1 billion euros). (Photo by Fabrice Coffrini/AFP 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)

In this June 23, 2015 photo, Ashaninka Indian beauty contestants pose for a photo with members of a visiting music group, hired to perform during the annual founding anniversary festivities, in Otari Nativo, Pichari, Peru. The contestants wear the simple brown dresses of the Ashaninka woman, their faces dotted in a traditional design with a red dye extracted from a spice called achiote. (Photo by Rodrigo Abd/AP Photo)

Flames from the Jerusalem Fire erupt in Lake County, California August 12, 2015. The wildfire running rampant through drought-parched vegetation in northern California grew by several thousand acres overnight into Wednesday, as firefighters worked to stop the flames from spreading toward communities. (Photo by Robert Galbraith/Reuters)

A woman dressed in an alien space suit carries an American flag and a sign that reads “Women's Revolution 1971” as she marches in a Women's Liberation demonstration on Fifth Avenue in New York, August 26, 1971. (Photo by Marty Lederhandler/AP Photo)

A vintage military aircraft is seen parked ahead of the International Air and Space Fair (FIDAE) at the Arturo Merino Benitez international airport in Santiago, Chile March 29, 2016. (Photo by Rodrigo Garrido/Reuters)

People enjoy themselves as they dance to Dominican music at a refugee camp for Haitians returning from the Dominican Republic on the outskirts of Anse-a-Pitres, Haiti, September 6, 2015. Dominican officials last month began implementing a controversial immigration program targeting Haitian migrants and Dominican-born people of Haitian descent. The program centers on round-ups and deportations that have triggered concerns about a slow-growing border migration crisis in the poorest country in the Americas. So far about 1,500 people have been deported at a pace of 50 to 100 per day, according to relief officials with access to records supplied by the Dominican government. (Photo by Andres Martinez Casares/Reuters)

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)