A portrait of late communist leader Mao Zedong is seen behind two hostesses as they pose for a picture at the Tiananmen Square during the 3nd plenary session of the National People's Congress in Beijing on March 13, 2016. China's Communist-controlled parliament opened its annual session on March 5 and is expected to appove a new five-year plan to tackle slowing growth in the world's second-largest economy. (Photo by Wang Zhao/AFP Photo)

In this May 14, 2016 photo, children wearing their school backpacks climb on a cliff using a bamboo ladder on their way home from school in Zhaojue county, southwest China's Sichuan province. A village in China's mountainous west where schoolchildren must climb an 800-meter (2,625-foot)-high bamboo ladder secured to a sheer cliff face may get a set of steel stairs to improve it's safety. (Photo by Chinatopix via AP Photo)

Female police officers from Istanbul's Motorcycled Police Unit wait to search vehicles during a roadside checkpoint operation on March 7, 2017 in Istanbul, Turkey. The rapid response unit nicknamed Dolphins is used primarily in crime prevention operations and has 25 female officers. 6% of Turkey's 250,000 strong police force are women, March 8 marks International Women's Day. (Photo by Chris McGrath/Getty Images)

Gunfire was brought to the steps of President Truman's Washington home, Blair House, as two assassins tried to kill the chief executive, November 1, 1950. One of the gunmen, Oscar Collazzo of New York, lay wounded at the bottom of Blair House's front steps after the president's police guard had finished their work, at the cost of one guards' life, Dec. 9, 1950. The second gunman was killed. (Photo by Harvey Georges/AP Photo)

In this photo taken June 3, 2009, a female North Korean soldier looks out from behind a barbed-wire fence around a camp on the North Korean river banks across from Hekou, northeastern China's Liaoning province. North Korea's top court has convicted two U.S. journalists, and sentenced them to 12 years in labor prison, the country's state news agency reported Monday. (Photo by Ng Han Guan/AP Photo)

Britain's skip Eve Muirhead, right, embraces Anna Sloan after defeating Switzerland to win the women's curling bronze medal at the 2014 Winter Olympics, Thursday, February 20, 2014, in Sochi, Russia. (Photo by Robert F. Bukaty/AP Photo)

Artist Robert Mickelson is an expert sculptor whose medium of choice happens to be glass. There's something so pure and serene about glass. Perhaps it's the material's transparency coupled with its fragility. Whatever it may be, Mickelson knows how to accentuate the element's most appealing qualities. Each of his life-like sculptural pieces exude realism with a refined quality.

This is a portion of the first color 360-degree panorama from NASA's Curiosity rover, made up of thumbnails, which are small copies of higher-resolution images. The mission's destination, a mountain at the center of Gale Crater called Mount Sharp, can be seen in the distance, to the left, beginning to rise up. The mountain's summit will be imaged later. (Photo by NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)