A lion cub wakes in the morning sun at the Zimanga private game reserve in South Africa on April 9, 2022. (Photo by Calvin Kotze/Animal News Agency)

An alligator devours a fish carcass he stole from a raven in Big Cypress National Preserve in Florida on November 24, 2022. The Big Cypress Swamp is a freshwater swampland located near the Everglades National Park. (Photo by Ronen Tivony/SOPA Images/Rex Features/Shutterstock)

Revellers participate in a colourful “flour war”, celebrating the “Ash Monday” or “Clean Monday”, a traditional festivity marking the end of the carnival season and the start of the 40-day Lent period until the Orthodox Easter, in the town of Galaxidi, Greece, on March 18, 2024. (Photo by Louisa Gouliamaki/Reuters)

Runner English Gardner poses for a portrait at the U.S. Olympic Committee Media Summit in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, California March 8, 2016. “My musical inspiration when I'm training is usually a lot of upbeat music”, said Gardner. (Photo by Lucy Nicholson/Reuters)

Ivan, a tourist from Russia, takes a selfie at Mai Khao Beach as a plane takes off from Phuket International Airport in Phuket, Thailand, January 17, 2022. (Photo by Jorge Silva/Reuters)

A panel of 10 high-profile judges from within the surfing industry including seven-time world surfing champion Stephanie Gilmore were tasked with selecting the best of the best surfing photos for the 2020 Nikon surf photography awards. The judges were looking for innovation and creativity, uniqueness, dramatic affect and sensory impact. Here: “Free Fall”. (Photo by Ren Mcgann/2020 Nikon Surf Photography Awards)

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)

The Soyuz MS-17 spacecraft carrying the crew formed of Kathleen Rubins of NASA, Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov of the Russian space agency Roscosmos blasts off to the International Space Station (ISS) from the launchpad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan on October 14, 2020. (Photo by Russian space agency Roscosmos/Handout via Reuters)