On August 31, 2012, a long filament of solar material that had been hovering in the sun's atmosphere, the corona, erupted out into space at 4:36 p.m. EDT. The coronal mass ejection, or CME, traveled at over 900 miles per second. The CME did not travel directly toward Earth, but did connect with Earth's magnetic environment, or magnetosphere, causing aurora to appear on the night of Monday, September 3. (Photo by NASA/GSFC/SDO via The Atlantic)

“Kids of Sapa”. Four little beautiful Hmong girls from Lao Chai Village, near Sapa, Vietnam. (Photo and caption by Felipe Hanower/National Geographic Traveler Photo Contest)

The goats are known to be good climbers, but this one is taking the climbing thing to a whole new level. It clambered on the tip of its owner’s stick, as a part of the roadside performance for a quick coin, on the outskirts of Faisalabad, Pakistan, November 5, 2012. (Photo by Fayyaz Hussain/Reuters)

Students carry a female trainee who has fallen into a stupor during high intensity training at Tianjiao Special Guard/Security Consultant camp on the outskirts of Beijing December 1, 2013. Former Chinese soldier Chen Yongqing has big ambitions for his bodyguard training school Tianjiao, which he says is China's first professional academy to train former soldiers and others as personal security guards. Chen charges 500,000 yuan ($82,400) a year for each protector as China's rich and famous look to bolster their safety and sense of importance. (Photo by Jason Lee/Reuters)

Tatyana Abramova, 33, plays with her home fox Plombir at her countryside house outside Siberian city of Novosibirsk on September 12, 2020. The official start of the Soviet experiment to better understand the domestication of animals by humans began in 1959, and was initiated by geneticists Dmitri Beliaiev and Lioudmila Trout on a farm in Akademgorodok, the scientific center of excellence in Siberia. Their primary objective was to domesticate foxes, to understand how the ancestor of wolves, another canine, evolved into a loyal and loving dog. And understand what this domestication tells us about the genetic evolution of species. (Photo by Alexander Nemenov/AFP Photo)

A smiling gecko bursts through a gap in the bark to surprise photographer in West Java, Indonesia in the last decade of March 2025. (Photo by Dzul Duzulfikri/Animal News Agency)

A herder sits amidst his camels at a cattle market in Lahore on June 3, 2025, ahead of the Muslim festival of Eid al-Adha. (Photo by Arif Ali/AFP Photo)

An aerial view shows a fishing boat which capsized due to weather conditions by the coast in Banda Aceh, Indonesia on June 23, 2025. (Photo by Chaideer Mahyuddin/AFP Photo)