Layers of breathtaking colour streak the rolling hills of this vast desert, making the landscape appear as though it has been tie-dyed. The natural phenomenon, nicknamed the “Painted Desert”, was formed when the area was once a river floodplain. Each colour corresponds to a different underground geological feature – rocks which have seemingly dyed the layers of earth above. Formed from volcanic activity, the hills at the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument in East Central Oregon, USA, are almost bursting with colour. Pictured: The colourful hills at the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument in East Central Oregon, USA. (Photo by Mark Brodkin/Solent News/SIPA Press)

These are the spectacular snaps of swirling star trails which transform the night sky into a kaleidoscope of color. Keen photographer Evgeniy Zaytsev, 24, captured the stunning shots on trips to Crimea, Altai and Murom, Russia. The pictures of circular star trails are formed by merging multiple photos taken over the course of several hours. Movement of the Earth causes the stars appear in different places in each image. Here: vibrate, colorful star trails over an abandoned beach house. (Photo by Evgeniy Zaytsev/Caters News)

These images show off some of the world's most majestic creatures silhouetted against the beautiful rising and setting sun. The vibrant pictures feature a variety of animals in the wild and were taken by a host of photographers at locations around the world. The striking images all have one thing in common: the photographers' awe-inspiring ability to perfectly capture the silhouettes of earth's beautiful creatures. Here: a blue wildebeest moves through grassland at dawn with the sun in the background in Mara Naboisho Conservancy, Kenya, Africa. (Photo by Renato Granieri/Caters News/Ardea)

Individuals and populations student winner. Limbing in the Tropics, photographed in Manaus, Brazil. While walking in the Amazon rainforest looking for bat roosts to set up mist nets to capture bats for scientific research, a faint and almost imperceptible noise suddenly caught this photographer’s attention. An anteater was climbing with exceptional ability in a tangled mess of branches and lianas. (Photo by Adrià López Baucells/University of Lisbon/British Ecological Society)

The fourth annual BigPicture Natural World Photography Competition aims to celebrate the diversity of life on Earth, and encourages people to protect and conserve it. Here: “The Salmon Catchers”. Terrestrial Wildlife. To capture this view of a mother grizzly bear and her cub, photographer Peter Mather set up a camera trap on a log that he knew the bears tended to traverse while fishing for salmon, in the Yukon River watershed in Canada. (Photo by Peter Mather/BigPicture Natural World Photography Competition 2017)

“Solar Impulse is a European long-range solar powered plane project being undertaken by Bertrand Piccard and André Borschberg. The project eventually hopes to succeed in the first circling of the earth with a piloted fixed-wing aircraft using only solar power. The first aircraft, bearing the Swiss aircraft registration code of HB-SIA, is a single-seater, capable of taking off under its own power, and intended to remain airborne up to 36 hours. This aircraft first flew an entire diurnal solar cycle, including nearly 9 hours of night flying, in a 26-hour flight on 7–8 July 2010”. – Wikipedia


Photo: Workers prepare the Solar Impulse airplane HB-SIA for a first runway test on November 19, 2009 in Dubendorf, Switzerland. Solar Impulse chairman Bertrand Piccard, psychatrist and aeronaut, who made the first non-stop round-the-world balloon flight, and CEO and former fighter pilot Andrй Borschberg plan a round-the-world flight, driven only by solar energy, for 2012. (Photo by Johannes Simon/Getty Images)