A hot air balloon rises in the sky during the International Hot-Air Balloon festival in Pokhara on December 27, 2024. With Nepal's snowy Himalayan peaks as a backdrop, the sky above Pokhara transformed into a vibrant canvas of colours for the country's first hot-air balloon festival. (Photo by Prakash Mathema/AFP Photo)

Karezoid Michal Karcz is a photographer from Warsaw, Poland. He first started with painting, which helped him to develop a vision that was hard to create with other visual techniques. Then in early 90s discovered photography. His early fascinations of painting and photography have been combined into one piece, with the use of digital tools. Digital photography gave him the opportunity to generate unique realities that were impossible to be created with an ordinary dark room techniques.

My name is Jakub and I’m a painter, illustrator & concept artist who lives and work in Poland. My speciality is dark fantasy, character design, concept art and portrait. Since several years I work and paint digitally, but I never gave up traditional drawing and painting. For me the most important in my work, is create unique atmosphere and tell some kind of story through my creations.

Nowadays, crossbreeding and gene splicing are creating things that would never have occurred in nature. Thanks to gene splicing, modern man can witness mice that glow in the dark, goats that produce milk which is then used to make bulletproof vests, and even cows that produce milk that is almost identical to human breast milk. One of the latest feats of human genius is the creation of Thompson and Morgan. By combining the genes of tomatoes and potatoes they were able to create a “TomTato”, which is essentially a plant that grows tomatoes and potatoes at the same time. With creations such as this, the world’s hunger problem may be resolved in a few decades.

A boy poses for a photo as he plays with a homemade toy gun in Qayara, south of Mosul, Iraq, Tuesday, November 22, 2016. For months, residents of the Iraqi town of Qayara have lived in the darkness from a cloud of toxic fumes released by oil fields lit by retreating Islamic State fighters. (Photo by Felipe Dana/AP Photo)

An unexpected side-effect of the flooding in parts of Pakistan has been that millions of spiders climbed up into the trees to escape the rising flood waters. Because of the scale of the flooding and the fact that the water has taken so long to recede, many trees have become cocooned in spiders’ webs.

Climbers ascend the walls of the Westway Climbing Centre on June 15, 2011 in London, England. The Westway indoor climbing centre is located under the A40 flyover in Shepherd's Bush has over 350 climbing routes, some of which rise to over 14 meters. (Photo by Oli Scarff/Getty Images)

The winter sun rises over the Somerset Levels viewed from Glastonbury Tor on December 10, 2011 in Glastonbury, England. After being hit by winter storms this week, the UK is experiencing colder temperatures but high winds are forecast to return. (Photo by Matt Cardy/Getty Images)