An Iranian athlete warms up prior to the start of the women's karate competition, made-up of clubs and teams from around the Tehran province, in Tehran on November 6, 2025. Some 230 participants, including 5-year-old girls, took part in the competition, with team's deriving only from the Tehran province taking part. (Photo by Atta Kenare/AFP Photo)

The sun rises behind the landmark Anchor on the quay in Appledore, North Devon, United Kingdom on June 7, 2022. The anchor has been decorated with hundreds of colourful crocheted flowers by the residents of the North Devon coastal village. (Photo by Terry Mathews/Alamy Live News)

A woman takes photos as Mount Agung volcano sends up another plume of smoke, seen from the Kubu subdistrict in Karangasem Regency on Indonesia's resort island of Bali on July 5, 2018. Mount Agung roared to life again on July 2, belching a plume of ash 2,000 metres (6,500 feet) high, as well as temporarily shuttering the airport and grounding hundreds of flights after erupting the week before. (Photo by Sonny Tumbelaka/AFP Photo)

The Tree Projects team spent 67 days documenting one eucalyptus regnans in the Styx valley of Tasmania. Using a combination of tree-climbing and elaborate arboreal rigging techniques, they produced an intimate portrait from an impossible perspective of one of the world’s largest individual flowering trees, which goes by several common names. These photos document the process that resulted in an extraordinary ultra high-definition photograph. Here: Haley nears the top of the tree. (Photo by Steven Pearce/The Tree Projects/The Guardian)

People will spout about impermanence of digital records, but books are really fragile, too. Alexis Arnold from San Francisco wanted to illustrate that with her project The Crystallized Book: collecting books and growing Borax crystals on them. Books range from literature classics to magazines, and there’s even a mysterious and arcane tome called “Linux: The Complete Manual”.

Artist Joe Hill poses on his 3D artwork, from the “Joe and Max” project as part of an advertising campaign, during its presentation at a park in Moscow, Russia, July 4, 2015. (Photo by Sergei Karpukhin/Reuters)

Students from Vida Nueva School present their dinosaur robot built with recycled materials during the annual robotics fair supported by the Bolivian Education Ministry in La Paz, August 10, 2015. (Photo by David Mercado/Reuters)

Soniya, 6, whose family moved to Islamabad from Pakistan's Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province to look for work, stands outside their house on the outskirts of Islamabad January 1, 2015. (Photo by Zohra Bensemra/Reuters)