Madina Zhanuzakova wears Simon Rocha, Shushi Thong, Moschino and Miu Miu to the Coach show during New York Fashion Week (NYFW) in New York, New York on September 9, 2024. (Photo by Sara Konradi for The Washington Post)

Brazilian singer Larissa de Macedo Machado, better known by her stage name Anitta performs during the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival at the Empire Polo Club in Indio, California, U.S., April 22, 2022. (Photo by Maria Alejandra Cardona/Reuters)

A Hercules beetle, one of the largest species of its kind, in seen at the Monteverde Cloud Forest Biological Reserve, in Puntarenas, Costa Rica, on May 23, 2023. In the Monteverde cloud forest, dense fog among the lush vegetation is increasingly rare and temperatures are increasing each year due to climate change. (Photo by Ezequiel Becerra/AFP Photo)

An Afghan girl who practices taekwondo poses for a photo in Kabul, Afghanistan, Monday, October 31, 2022. The ruling Taliban have banned women from sports as well as barring them from most schooling and many realms of work. A number of women posed for an AP photographer for portraits with the equipment of the sports they loved. Though they do not necessarily wear the burqa in regular life, they chose to hide their identities with their burqas because they fear Taliban reprisals and because some of them continue to practice their sports in secret. (Photo by Ebrahim Noroozi/AP Photo)

Swedish singer Cornelia Jakobs performs after winning the 2023 Eurovision Song Contest in Liverpool, Britain on May 13, 2023. (Photo by Phil Noble/Reuters)

An aerial view shows a fishing boat which capsized due to weather conditions by the coast in Banda Aceh, Indonesia on June 23, 2025. (Photo by Chaideer Mahyuddin/AFP Photo)

Members of the Times Square Alliance snow clearing team take a photo on a snowbank at Times Square in the Manhattan borough of New York January 23, 2016. A winter storm dumped nearly 2 feet (58 cm) of snow on the suburbs of Washington, D.C., on Saturday before moving on to Philadelphia and New York, paralyzing road, rail and airline travel along the U.S. East Coast. (Photo by Shannon Stapleton/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)