A General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper stands on the runway during “Black Dart”, a live-fly, live fire demonstration of 55 unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, at Naval Base Ventura County Sea Range, Point Mugu, near Oxnard, California July 31, 2015. (Photo by Patrick T. Fallon/Reuters)

A handout photo made available by the Roscosmos State Corporation for Space Activities shows the Soyuz-2.1b launch vehicle with the OneWeb communication satellites launching from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, 07 February 2020. Thirty-four satellites from OneWeb were successfully put into orbit on a single Soyuz rocket from Baikonur. (Photo by Roscosmos/EPA/EFE)

A protester poses for photos next to a burning police vehicle in Los Angeles, Saturday, May 30, 2020, during a demonstration over the death of George Floyd. a black man who was killed in police custody in Minneapolis on May 25. (Photo by Ringo H.W. Chiu/AP Photo)

Vehicles pass through the heavy fog and air pollution that cover Skopje valley in the early morning, in Skopje, The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, 14 December 2017. According to media reports, Skopje is considered one of the most polluted cities in the world. (Photo by Georgi Licovski/EPA/EFE)

A paramedic enters an ambulance vehicle as she responds to a call received by Ambulance Station No 3 of Rostov-on-Don's Emergency Care Hospital on New Year's Day in Rostov-On-Don, Russia on January 1, 2022. (Photo by Erik Romanenko/TASS)

Vehicles drive amid rainfall in Hyderabad, Pakistan, 27 June 2025. Heavy monsoon rains have impacted major cities across Pakistan, including Islamabad, Lahore, Hyderabad and Karachi, triggering urban flooding and power outages. Authorities remain on high alert. (Photo by Nadeem Khawar/EPA)

Most people know Nikon as a purveyor of pro and consumer-grade digital cameras. But the company's expertise with optics bleeds over into related markets – it's one of the science community's major suppliers of microscopes. And each year the company asks the community to send it some of their favorite images of tiny objects. A panel of scientists and journalists have chosen the best of this past year's submissions, which Nikon has placed on its Small World site.

Photo: Honorable Mention. “Snow crystal, illuminated with colored lights (5x)”. (Photo by Dr. Kenneth Libbrecht, California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Department of Physics, Pasadena, California, USA)

Plaster cast moulds of victims of the Mount Vesuvius eruption lie on a display table in a laboratory at Pompeii October 13, 2015. An expert team made up of archaeologists, radiologists, orthodontists and anthropologists began on September 2015 to use CAT scan technology (computerised axial tomography) to peer inside the plaster cast moulds of Pompeii's victims, in a study that has added more detail to previous findings. A 16-layer scan had to be used in order to penetrate the hardened plaster but the results showed up impressive skeletal remains and near perfect teeth. (Photo by Alessandro Bianchi/Reuters)