A visitor takes a selfie with a backdrop of sunflowers in full bloom at the E-World Sunflower Garden in Daegu, 237 kilometers southeast of Seoul, South Korea, 13 July 2024. (Photo by Yonhap/EPA)

“Cassowaries are large, flightless birds related to emus and (more distantly) to ostriches, rheas, and kiwis”, writes Olivia Judson in the September issue of National Geographic magazine. How large? People-size: Adult males stand well over five foot five and top 110 pounds. Females are even taller, and can weigh more than 160 pounds. Dangerous when roused, they’re shy and peaceable when left alone. But even birds this big and tough are prey to habitat loss. The dense New Guinea and Australia rain forests where they live have dwindled. Today cassowaries might number 1,500 to 2,000. And because they help shape those same forests – by moving seeds from one place to another – “if they vanish”, Judson writes, “the structure of the forest would gradually change” too. (Photo by Christian Ziegler/National Geographic)

A policeman controls traffic at 42nd Street and 7th Avenue as New York City remains without electricity caused by a blackout that affected the entire city and most of the eastern part of the nation August 15, 2003 in New York, New York. More than 50 million people were affected by the outage, in Toronto, Detroit, Cleveland and New York City. (Photo by Jose Jimenez/Primera Hora/Getty Images)

In a July 14, 1967 file photo, left, National Guardsmen make their way along Market Street in Newark, N.J, after an evening of deadly rioting and looting in what came to be known as the Newark riots. In a June 16, 2017 photo, right, an ambulance drives on the same block 50 years later. (Photo by AP Photo/File, left; Julio Cortez, right)

Some of the best entries so far in the 2016 Insight Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition. There are two weeks left to enter, and the winners will be announced in September. Here: Aurora over Laksvatn Fjord, Laksvatn, Norway. The aurora borealis dances in the skies over the town of Laksvatn, with the Milky Way to the left. The image is a single shot with no compositing, only post-processing to bring out the aurora, and some colour corrections. The photographer Matt Walford said: “I love the way the northern lights look like they are just wistfully dancing over the fjord, framed by the mountains on either side”. (Photo by Matt Walford/National Maritime Museum)

A shooting star (L, top) is seen on the night sky during the perseid meteor shower in Jankowo, near Poznan, 11 August 2016. The first half of August is traditionally the best time to look out for meteors called “shooting stars”, or perseids which are the leftover dust particles of a comet tail associated with comet Swift-Tuttle. (Photo by Lukasz Ogrodowczyk/EPA)

Fareeda, wife of Shameem Ahmad Ganai, who according to Fareeda was arrested during a clampdown a day before the scrapping of the special constitutional status in Kashmir by the government, tends to her husband's sheep in their house, in Pulwama, south of Srinagar, August 13, 2019. (Photo by Danish Siddiqui/Reuters)

An athlete takes part in a warm-up around the track of the National Stadium in Tokyo on September 12, 2025, ahead of the World Athletics Championships. (Photo by Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP Photo)