Penitentes, or nieves penitentes (Spanish for “penitent-shaped snows”), are a snow formation found at high altitudes. They take the form of tall thin blades of hardened snow or ice, closely spaced with the blades oriented towards the general direction of the sun.

Workers carry a rope line to fasten a decommissioned ship at the Alang shipyard in the western Indian state of Gujarat, March 27, 2015. The European Union plans to impose strict new rules on how companies scrap old tankers and cruise liners, run aground and dismantled on beaches in South Asia. However the practice in India, Bangladesh and Pakistan, hazardous for humans and the environment, will still be hard to stop. European, Turkish and Chinese recyclers are set to benefit from the revamped standards. Depending on raw material prices, ship owners can make up to $500 per tonne of steel from an Indian yard, compared with $300 in China and just $150 in Europe. (Photo by Amit Dave/Reuters)

Artist Sergio Albiac has launched an experiment in generative portraiture that uses images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope to build up images of people

Only with a pencil, ruler and protractor, without the help of a computer, Venezuelan artist Rafael Araujo creates complex fields of three dimensional space where butterflies come to life and shells rise from mathematical spirals.

The NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations (NEEMO) 21 mission began on July 21 as an international crew of aquanauts splashed down to the undersea Aquarius Reef Base, located 62 feet below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. The NEEMO 21 crew will perform research both inside and outside the habitat during a 16-day simulated space mission. During simulated spacewalks carried out underwater, they will evaluate tools and mission operation techniques that could be used in future space missions, including journeys to Mars. (Photo by Karl Shreeves/NASA)

China has sent its first woman into space on a mission to dock with an orbiting station, the latest step in an ambitious programme to go to the moon and on to Mars.

Photo: China's first female astronaut Liu Yang, waves during a sending off ceremony before she departs for the Shenzhou 9 spacecraft rocket launch pad at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in Jiuquan, China, Saturday, June 16, 2012. China will send its first woman and two other astronauts into space Saturday to work on a temporary space station for about a week, in a key step toward becoming only the third nation to set up a permanent base in orbit. (Photo by Ng Han Guan/AP Photo)

An young Indian Jain devotee dressed as Lord Krishna participates in a religious rally organised on the occasion of Mahavir Jayanti in Kolkata on April 2, 2015. The most important religious holiday in Jainism, Mahavir Jayanti celebrates the birth of Mahavira, the last Tirthankara, which is generally accepted as 599 BCE. (Photo by Dibyangshu Sarkar/AFP Photo)

An Indian soldier from the international peace keeping force (IPKF) instructs young Sri Lankan recruits in shooting, part of the training given to the citizen's volunteer force in the North-Eastern Sri Lankan city of Batticaloa, September 28, 1989. (Photo by Barbara Walton/AP Photo)