In this photograph taken on October 27, 2017 an Afghan woman collects saffron flowers after picking them in a field on the outskirt of Herat For years, Afghanistan has tried to give farmers alternatives such as fruit crops and saffron to wean them away from poppy farming – the lifeblood of the Taliban insurgency. International donors have splurged billions of dollars on counter- narcotics efforts in Afghanistan over the past decade, including efforts to encourage farmers to switch to other cash crops such as saffron. But those efforts have shown little results. (Photo by Hoshang Hashimi/AFP Photo)

In this April 23, 2015 photo, friends Jia Haixia, left, and Jia Wenqi work to plant a tree in a field in Yeli village near Shijiazhuang city in northern China's Hebei province. For the past 13 years, Jia Wenqi, who has no arms, and Jia Haixia, who is blind, have worked together to plant and water more than 12,000 trees near their village. (Photo by Helene Franchineau/AP Photo)

A player breaks with the bottle during the bottle-kicking game in Hallaton, central England April 6, 2015. The game is played between Hallaton and the neighbouring village of Medbourne each Easter Monday in which participants compete to bring the bottle across a stream that separates the villages. The bottle is an old field barrel holding about a gallon of beer. (Photo by Darren Staples/Reuters)

Rescuers attend an injured fan lying on the field of the Cuscatlan stadium in San Salvador, El Salvador, Saturday, May 20, 2023. At least nine people were killed and dozens more injured when stampeding fans pushed through one of the access gates at a quarterfinal Salvadoran league soccer match between Alianza and FAS. (Photo by Milton Flores/AP Photo)

A jaguar (Panthera onca) growls at the Mata Ciliar association, an organization for the conservation of biodiversity, in Jundiai, Sao Paulo state, Brazil on May 29, 2025. Twenty-five pumas and ten jaguars are currently recovering at the Brazilian Center for the Conservation of Neotropical Felines at Mata Ciliar, a site as large as 40 football fields where monkeys, wild dogs, maned wolves, ocelots, and other regional animals are also rehabilitated. (Photo by Nelson Almeida/AFP Photo)

Ryo Minemizu, one of Japan’s emerging stars in the field of marine life photography and the 2017 winner of the Nikkei National Geographic photography prize, captures the beauty and complexity of plankton that drift in our planet’s oceans and other bodies of water in meticulous detail. Here: Batesian mimicry by a Soleichthys fish larva. (Photo by Ryo Minemizu/The Guardian)

French sculptor Pierre Matter was born in 1964. “A mystical child, then a tormented teenager, he studied mathematics half-heartedly. It was only logical that he headed naturally, though initially in an erratic manner, for the mysterious universe of artistic creation. His slow progression in this field led him to try out many kinds of expression and material, from oil to gouache to ink, from comic strips to canvas, and also bas-relief in stone.”