A delegate poses for a photo at the end of the closing ceremony of the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in front of the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China, on Saturday, October 22, 2022. President Xi Jinping is officially set for a third term surrounded by allies, after key Communist Party officials without close ties to the Chinese leader exited the nation's top leadership body. (Photo by Bloomberg)

A worker looks at Spring Festival decorations ahead of Chinese Lunar New Year festivities in Beijing, China on January 12, 2023. (Photo by Thomas Peter/Reuters)

Children wearing cardboard lion dance masks walk along a street in Beijing on January 13, 2023. China has announced its first overall population decline in recent years amid an aging society and plunging birthrate. (Photo by Mark Schiefelbein/AP Photo)

Soldiers evacuate a hostage from a mass shooting scene at the Terminal 21 shopping mall in Nakhon Ratchasima, Thailand, 09 February 2020. According to media reports, at least 21 people were killed, and as many as 30 wounded after a Thai soldier, identified as 32-year-old Jakraphanth Thomma, went on a shooting rampage with a M60 machine gun in the city of Nakhon Ratchasima, also known as Korat. Thomma held an unknown number of people hostage within the Terminal 21 shopping mall for around 17 hours before being shot and killed in a police operation. (Photo by Rungroj Yongrit/EPA/EFE)

Afghan tea seller Farooq Shah, center, fills kettles with tea for customers at a market place in Kabul, Afghanistan, Wednesday, December 4, 2019. (Photo by Altaf Qadri/AP Photo)

Artists wear colourful “deconfinement hats” made of paper mache and inspired by Song dynasty headwear, for social distancing, at 59 Rivoli gallery in Paris as it prepares a general reopening later in the week, following the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in France, June 3, 2020. (Photo by Benoit Tessier/Reuters)

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)