A pair of black-necked stilts fight over their marshland territory in Orlando, Florida in the last decade of July 2024. (Photo by Jake Landing/Solent News)

A man sleeps in a subway train in New York city on August 1, 2024. (Photo by Charly Triballeau/AFP Photo)

“Microscope images forge an extraordinary bond between science and art, said Hidenao Tsuchiya, Olympus America's Vice President and General Manager for the Scientific Equipment Group. We founded this competition to focus on the fascinating stories coming out of today's life science research laboratories. The thousands of images that people have shared with the competition over the years reflect some of the most exciting work going on in research today – work that can help shed light on the living universe and ultimately save lives. We look at BioScapes and these beautiful images as sources of education and inspiration to us and the world”. – OlympusBioScapes

Photo: Pretarsus of the third leg of a female drone fly (Eristalis tenax), ventral view, by Dr. Jan Michels, Institute of Zoology, Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel, Germany. (Photo by Olympus BioScapes)

This picture taken on November 1, 2014 shows Japanese body-painting artist Hikaru Cho (L) adding the finishing touches to a body painting of fingers sticking out from prison cell bars on the head of Ryonosuke Tanaka during “Tokyo Designers Week” in Tokyo. Cho, 21, was born to Chinese parents in Japan and burst onto Tokyo's art scene when she entered the city's Musashino Art University in 2012. Cho's ultimate ambition is to paint an entire – and naked – body. (Photo by Yoshikazu Tsuno/AFP Photo)

A North Korean soldier looks through a window at Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard (L) and her partner Tim Mathieson (C) while they visit the United Nations Command Military Armistice Commission (UNCMAC) meeting room at the border village of Panmunjom, between South and North Korea, on April 24, 2011 South Korea. Gillard will visit Japan, the Republic of Korea and China during a bilateral tour of North Asia from April 20-27. (Photo by Jeon Heon-Kyun-pool/Getty Images)

The Soyuz MS-17 spacecraft carrying the International Space Station (ISS) expedition 64 crew of NASA astronaut Kate Rubins and Russian cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov blasts off to the ISS from the Russian-leased Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on October 14, 2020. (Photo by Roscosmos/Handout via AFP Photo)

This undated image provided by World View shows World View capsule and balloon spacecraft that will rise to 100,000 feet above Earth for passengers to see the curvature of the planet and the blackness of space. Space tourism companies are employing designs including winged vehicles, vertical rockets with capsules and high-altitude balloons. While developers envision ultimately taking people to orbiting habitats, the moon or beyond, the immediate future involves short flights into or near the lowest reaches of space without going into orbit. (Photo by World View via AP Photo)

In this photo taken on Monday, October 27, 2014, a cactus stands at a broken window in a damaged house after shelling not far from Donetsk airport in the town of Donetsk, eastern Ukraine. Donetsk, which has lost about 400,000 of its 1 million pre-war population, is bracing to a winter ahead. In a climate like eastern Ukraine's, where temperatures typically stay below zero all winter, the damage to the critical infrastructure and lack of effort to provide adequate shelter to people whose homes were destroyed could literally mean a death from the cold. (Photo by Dmitry Lovetsky/AP Photo)