These brave models show no fear as they pose with bears, tigers and wolves in scenes straight from the pages of a fairy tale. The snaps show the models cuddling up to the deadly animals and even taking naps with the often unpredictable creatures. Here: “Marina with a bear”. Stepan, a 700-pound grizzly bear, was adopted by a Russian couple when he was just 3 months old. (Photo by Olga Barantseva/Caters News Agency)

For more than 2,000 years, women from the Baiga tribe in the highland district of Dindori, in central India’s Madhya Pradesh state, have been tattooed. Sumintra, 25, from Bona village, has the markings across her forehead, legs and arms. The women who work as tattoo artists are knowledgable about the different types of designs and pigments preferred by various tribes, and their meanings are passed to them by their mothers. The tattooing ‘season’ begins with the approach of winter. (Photo by Ronny Sen/WaterAid/The Guardian)

In northwest Russia, in a small village called Alekhovshchina, Nadia Sablin's aunts spend the warmer months together in the family home and live as the family has always lived, chopping wood to heat the house and making their own clothes. Sablin's book of photographs, “Aunties: The Seven Summers of Alevtina and Ludmila”, is published by Duke University Press. Here: “Two-Handed Saw, 2014”. (Photo by Nadia Sablin)

A man looks at a pyroclastic flow during the eruption of Mount Semeru in Lumajang, East Java, on November 19, 2025. (Photo by Agus Harianto/AFP Photo)

Anti-racist Loldiers of Odin clowns speak with police as they take to the streets against anti-immigration marchers in Tampere, Finland January 23, 2016. Police prevented the groups from confronting each other. On the northern fringes of Europe, Finland has little history of welcoming large numbers of refugees, unlike neighbouring Sweden. But as with other European countries, it is now struggling with a huge increase in asylum seekers and the authorities are wary of any anti-immigrant vigilantism. (Photo by Kalle Parkkinen/Reuters/Lehtikuva)

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)

Haitians pull a car atop a pushcart in Port-au-Prince, October 11, 1994. The price of gasoline has fallen to about $6 US per gallon since U.S. forces occupied Haiti. Before, gasoline had cost as much as $10 U.S. per gallon. (Photo by Eric Draper/AP Photo)

A Palestinian girl with her body painted by special effects makeup artist Alaa Abu Mustafa, 20, sits on a boat in the southern Gaza Strip, March 22, 2018. (Photo by Ibraheem Abu Mustafa/Reuters)