Female metro passengers hold flowers presented to them by metro workers, prior to International Women's Day in Kiev, Ukraine, 02 March 2016. The hustle and bustle of the morning commute is broken up by an unexpected surprise. The first passengers to step on the train receive – a warm welcome and a pot of flowers. One woman says, “It's very nice. All the running around and then you're given a flower, it's not often. It's very nice. I'm going to take care of this flower”. International Women's Day first emerged from the activities of labour movements at the turn of the twentieth century, in North America and across Europe, it is celebrated on March 08 in many countries around the world. (Photo by Sergey Dolzhenko/EPA)

German photographer Martin Klimas, who you may remember from his exploding porcelain figure series, creates breathtaking photos of flowers exploding into a million beautiful pieces. To achieve this effect, he soaks the petals in liquid nitrogen to make them brittle and hits the flower with an air gun.

These images have been created using a colour scanning electron microscope (SEM) by the award-winning Eye of Science, comprised of snapper Oliver Meckes and biologist Nicole Ottawa. For a decade the pair, based in Reutlingen in the south of Germany, worked with an old SEM they saved from the scrapheap, but for the last five years they have used a £250,000 FEI Quanta Series Field Emission SEM. Oliver said: “Flowers are beautiful in 'normal' view, but when you look closer, some parts get very bizarre and unexpected structures appear – flowers within flowers, worlds within worlds”. Photo: The floret of a Chamomile flower up close and personal. (Photo by Oliver Meckes/Barcroft Media)

Flowers are placed on actress Elizabeth Taylor's Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on March 23, 2011 in Hollywood, California. The Academy Award winning actress died Wednesday at age 79. (Photo by Charley Gallay/Getty Images)

“The scientists behind NASA's $2.5 billion Curiosity rover mission on Mars on Tuesday explained the nature of a tiny, gleaming "flower" embedded in Red Planet rock, and revealed where they'll be using the SUV-sized robot's drill for the first time”. – Alan Boyle via NBCNews.com

Photo: Scientists say that a “Martian flower”, seen here in an image from the Curiosity rover's Mars Hand Lens Imager, is a 2-millimeter-wide grain or pebble that's embedded in the surrounding rock. Another, darker-colored mineral grain can be seen above and to the left. (Photo by NASA)

To the woman presented a flower in Sevastopol, Ukraine, on March 8, 2013. Activists presented this day on the street free 155 tulips to women. The police tried to arrest activists for illegal trade as couldn't believe in free distribution of flowers. (Photo by Sergey Anashkevitch)

Bowie Snow runs in the tulips at Strawberry Fields, Lifton, Devon on April 13, 2025. The South West's largest tulip festival takes place across April, showcasing 250,000 Tulips with over 40 varieties across three acres at Strawberry Fields in UK. (Photo by William Dax/South West News Service)

A young woman dances in a field of tulips in a park in central Moscow on May 10, 2019. Moscow enjoys a heatwave while the rest of Europe struggles with cold weather. (Photo by Mladen Antonov/AFP Photo)