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)

A fledgling solar system containing deep within it enough water vapor to fill all the oceans on Earth five times, located in our Milky Way galaxy about 1,000 light years from Earth in the constellation Perseus. (Photo by Reuters/NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Astrid Perez (L) and Ramon Camacho lay on the Playa during the Burning Man 2015 “Carnival of Mirrors” arts and music festival in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada, September 6, 2015. Sunday marks the last day of the sold-out festival that gathered approximately 70,000 people from all over the world. (Photo by Jim Urquhart/Reuters)

Guests attend preview event for “Candytopia”, the outrageously interactive candy wonderland, opening in San Francisco, USA on September 6, 2018. (Photo by Kelly Sullivan/Getty Images for Candytopia)

Drag Queens set a Guinness World Record for the longest feather boa at 1.2 miles, along 42 St, in Times Square in New York, U.S., June 20, 2019. (Photo by Eduardo Munoz/Reuters)

In this photo taken October 12, 2019, a spiritual healer known as a “madrina” starts a ritual on Sorte Mountain where followers of indigenous goddess Maria Lionza gather annually in Venezuela's Yaracuy state. While her followers gather on the mountain for weeks at this time of the year, October 12 marks the biggest gathering, coinciding with Indigenous People's Day, known in Latin America as “Dia de la Raza”. (Photo by Ariana Cubillos/AP Photo)

In this photo taken on Monday, August 5, 2019, a family watches explosions at a military ammunition depot near the city of Achinsk in eastern Siberia's Krasnoyarsk region, in Achinsk, Russia. Russian officials say powerful explosions at a military depot in Siberia left 12 people injured and one missing and forced over 16,500 people to leave their homes. (Photo by Dmitry Dub/AP Photo)

People take turns stomping the Christopher Columbus statue after it was toppled in front of the Minnesota State Capitol in St. Paul, Minn., on Wednesday, June 10, 2020. (Photo by Leila Navidi/Star Tribune via AP Photo)