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)

Children hold signs thanking truck drivers hauling rocks to the Lake Oroville Dam after an evacuation was ordered for communities downstream from the dam in Oroville, California, U.S. February 13, 2017. (Photo by Jim Urquhart/Reuters)

Black-headed gulls sit on pickets at a riverside in Tokyo, Japan, December 27, 2015. (Photo by Toru Hanai/Reuters)

A woman carries her child in a basket as she walks on a road in Allahabad, India, August 11, 2016. (Photo by Jitendra Prakash/Reuters)

An Indian artists uses sparkles to decorate statues of the Hindu god Lord Ganesh ahead of the forthcoming Ganesh Chaturthi festival at a workshop in Hyderabad on August 29, 2016. The statues are being prepared for the Ganesh Chaturthi festival a popular eleven-day long Hindu religious festival in India which will be celebrated from September 5 to 15. (Photo by Noah Seelam/AFP Photo)

A news reporter doing a stand up near a sea wall in Cedar Key, Fla., is covered by an unexpected wave as Hurricane Hermine nears the Florida coast, Thursday, September 1, 2016. Hurricane Hermine gained new strength Thursday evening and roared ever closer to Florida's Gulf Coast, where rough surf began smashing against docks and boathouses and people braced for the first direct hit on the state from a hurricane in over a decade. (Photo by John Raoux/AP Photo)

People protest at the Boston Free Speech Rally in Boston, USA on August 19. 2017. With the Boston Free Speech rally was closed to the media (despite the Boston Common being a public space), a lot of the media’s coverage centred on the tensions within the larger counter-protest. (Photo by Stephanie Keith/Reuters)

Security chase a spectator on centre court during a rain delay on Day Two of the National Bank Open presented by Rogers at IGA Stadium on August 10, 2021 in Montreal, Canada. (Photo by Minas Panagiotakis/Getty Images)