Iraq's second largest city, Mosul, is locked under the rule of extremists from the Islamic State group trying to purge it of everything they see as contradicting their stark vision of Islam. A trove of photographs now housed at the Library of Congress offers a glimpse of a different Mosul – before wars, insurgency, sectarian strife and now radicals' rule. The scenes were taken in the autumn of 1932 by staff from the American Colony Photo Department during a visit to Iraq at the end of the British mandate. (Photo by AP Photo)

Catwalks hang over a section of the newly constructed eastern span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge during a media tour of the self-anchored suspension span tower on August 29, 2011 in Oakland, California. Contruction crews have erected twelve foot wide catwalks that connect to the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge self-anchored suspension span's tower and crews will begin to lay the nearly one mile of main cable beginning in early 2012. The bridge has been under constrution since 2002 with an estimated price tag of $6.3 billion and will have the world's tallest Self-Anchored Suspension (SAS) tower once completed. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

An Andean man and a woman, depicting Inca's legendary characters Manco Capac and Mama Ocllo, pose for a portrait in a Uros island at Lake Titicaca before a re-enactment in Puno November 5, 2014. The Uros islands are a group of 70 man-made totora reed islands floating on the lake, which according to Peru's tourism board iPeru is the world's highest navigable lake at over 4,000 meters above sea level. The Uros people fish and hunt, but tourism is their main source of livelihood. (Photo by Enrique Castro-Mendivil/Reuters)

In this picture taken on June 24, 2017 participants take part in the “Women's Beautiful Buttock series” contest shopping mall in Shenyang, Liaoning province. Ladies from different parts of China gathered in Shenyang to show off their perfect curves during the competition. While it is unclear who ended up taking home 1st place, it looks like everyone had a good time regardless of whether or not they won the title. In November 2016, Brazil held a similar competition, Miss BumBum, which was attended by more than 10 million people. Erika Canela, a 24-year-old beauty from Bahia won the main title of the contest. (Photo by AFP Photo/Stringer)

All the people we meet, all the things we know, and all of our experiences shape our souls, forever marking our faces. This was probably the main idea of the performance piece created by Chinese artist Zhang Huan, in which his face was painted over by three calligraphers with the names of people he knew, personal stories, and random thoughts. Truly, it amazing just how much we can find out about a person just by looking at their face. Surely, not everyone has the ability to see into the soul of the person just by looking at their face, but those that do can easily see the person’s personality, their intelligence, and sometimes even get glimpse into their past. Though it sounds like magic to people who don’t have this ability, it is completely true. Somehow, our mind can pick up on the miniscule changes of the facial structure and figure out the dominant facial expressions of that person. (Photo by Zhang Huan)

Have you ever heard of a psychological phenomenon which lets us easily understand words, even if the order of letters is mixed up, as long as the first and last letters remain in their rightful place? Similarly, the art works of Michael Turner use only two colors to highlight the main futures of well-recognized superheroes, allowing our imagination to create the rest of the picture. The colors used in the pictures weren’t chosen at random. They perfectly reflect the key characteristics of the superheroes that they depict. For example, the picture of Flash uses red and yellow colors, which are exactly the colors of his costume. While the picture of Green Lantern is, you’ve guessed it, green and black. (Photo by Michael Turner)

An image produced by the Hubble telescope of the perfectly “edge-on” galaxy, or NGC 4013, March 1, 2001. This new Hubble picture reveals, with great detail, huge clouds of dust and gas extending along, as well as far above, the galaxy's main disk. NGC 4013 is a spiral galaxy, similar to the Milky Way, lying some 55 million light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Ursa Major. Viewed face-on, it would look like a nearly circular pinwheel, but NGC 4013 happens to be seen edge-on from our vantage point. Even at 55 million light-years, the galaxy is larger than Hubble's field of view, and the image shows only a little more than half of the object, albeit with unprecedented detail. (Photo Courtesy of NASA/Newsmakers)

REUTLINGEN, GERMANY - NOVEMBER 17: Students hang out finished parchment leather at the LGR (Lederinstitut Gerberschule Reutlingen) tannery school on November 17, 2010 in Reutlingen, Germany. Even in early antiquity and up their hair or dried goat and sheep skins were used as material for documents. In the small Asian city Pergamon these skins were processed in large quantities for this purpose, so they formed the main trading arm of the city, of which the name is parchment is derived. In medieval times, reached the parchment is of great importance, it was such as France's production under the supervision of the University of Paris. Even now, important documents, placed on their unlimited shelf life as possible large value (eg diplomas, addresses, memory, writings, documents for primary and keystones) written on parchment...