Muqtada Haider turns the switches to transfer electricity to private homes in Baghdad, Iraq, Friday, September 10, 2021. In Iraq, electricity is a potent symbol of endemic corruption, rooted in the country’s sectarian power-sharing system. This contributes to chronic electrical outages of up to 14 hours a day in a major oil-producing nation with plentiful energy resources. (Photo by Hadi Mizban/AP Photo)

Zhou Xiaoxuan, center, weeps as she speaks to her supporters upon arrival at a courthouse in Beijing, Wednesday, December 2, 2020. Zhou, a Chinese woman who filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against a TV host, told dozens of cheering supporters at a courthouse Wednesday she hopes her case will encourage other victims of gender violence in a system that gives them few options to pursue complaints. (Photo by Andy Wong/AP Photo)

Air conditioners, more than 500 in total, hang on the wall of an office building on August 15, 2011 in Fuzhou, Fujiang Province of China. This 25-story office building was built with no central air conditioner system, each office has it own individual unit installed on the exterior creating this wall of air conditioners. (Photo by ChinaFotoPress/Getty Images)

Zookeepers measure the length of a pueblan milk snake in the Reptile House of ZSL London Zoo as part of their annual weighing and measuring of their animals on August 25, 2011 in London, England. The heights and weights of over 750 different animal species at the zoo are recorded into the International Species Information System, to monitor their health and share the data with other zoos across the world. (Photo by Oli Scarff/Getty Images)

Delta CEO Ed Bastian talks about the century-old airline's past and technology such as generative artificial intelligence that he sees shaping its future during a Consumer Electronics Show (CES) presentation at The Sphere concert venue in Las Vegas on January 7, 2025. Delta on January 7 marked a century of flying with visions of a future in which artificial intelligence and internet age partnerships make air travel fun and seamless. (Photo by Glenn Chapman/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)

Plaster cast moulds of victims of the Mount Vesuvius eruption lie on a display table in a laboratory at Pompeii October 13, 2015. An expert team made up of archaeologists, radiologists, orthodontists and anthropologists began on September 2015 to use CAT scan technology (computerised axial tomography) to peer inside the plaster cast moulds of Pompeii's victims, in a study that has added more detail to previous findings. A 16-layer scan had to be used in order to penetrate the hardened plaster but the results showed up impressive skeletal remains and near perfect teeth. (Photo by Alessandro Bianchi/Reuters)