A customer asks for the price of a bittergourd at Duri market on a railway track in Jakarta, January 8, 2016. Indonesia's annual inflation rate cooled to the lowest in six years in December, which might pave the way for the central bank to cut a benchmark rate held at 7.50 percent since February 2015. (Photo by Reuters/Beawiharta)

Visitors look on as a man (front) inserts two live snakes through his nose and mouth during a performance at an amusement park to celebrate the 65th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China and the 7-day national day holiday, in Jinhua, Zhejiang province October 1, 2014. (Photo by Reuters/Stringer)

Beautiful, strange and occasionally alarming pictures from the shortlist for this year’s Wellcome image awards – which celebrate the very best in science photography and imaging – from an x-ray of a bat to a micrograph of a kidney stone. The exhibition opens on 12 March at three science centres and the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester. Photo: Scanning electron micrograph (SEM) of an Arabidopsis thaliana flower, also commonly known as thale cress. Some of the anthers are open, revealing pollen grains ready for dispersal. Arabidopsis was the first plant to have its entire genome sequenced and is widely used as a model organism in molecular and plant biology. Horizontal width of image is 1200 microns. Magnification 100x. (Photo by Stefan Eberhard/Wellcome Images)

Behaviour: Mammals category. Giant Gathering by Tony Wu, USA. Dozens of sperm whales mingled noisily off Sri Lanka’s northeast coast, stacked as far down as Tony could see. This was a congregation of dozens of social units, like a gathering of the clans. Aggregations like this could be a critical part of the whales’ rich social lives but are rarely reported. Some two thirds of the population was wiped out before commercial whaling was banned in 1986. This kind of major gathering could be “a sign that populations are recovering”, says Tony. (Photo by Tony Wu/Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2017)

Aoife Brack (Gorey, Wexford) with Sean Brack on her shoulders having great fun with the Bubble performers at the Kaleidoscope festival in Russborough House, Co. Wicklow, Ireland on July 2, 2023. (Photo by Nick Bradshaw for The Irish Times)

Billions of newly hatched locusts are spreading throughout Israel's South. The young locusts identified in the Negev Desert area are the offspring of locust swarms that entered Israel from Egypt in March. (Photo by Eliahu Hershkovitz/Haaretz)

A hogweed bonking beetle and yellow dung fly in a stalk standoff (the fly gave in), in Burley-in-Wharfedale, Yorkshire, England. (Photo by Rebecca Cole/Alamy Stock Photo)

Deers walk past Indonesia's honour guard as they wait for the arrival of Saudi Arabia's King Salman bin Abdul Aziz at the presidential palace in Bogor on March 1, 2017. Cheering crowds welcomed King Salman on March 1 as he began the first visit by a Saudi monarch to Indonesia for almost 50 years, seeking stronger economic ties with the world's most populous Muslim-majority country. (Photo by Adek Berry/AFP Photo)