Revelers enter the cold water during the annual Polar Bear Plunge on New Year's Day, Wednesday, January 1, 2025, in New York. (Photo by Andres Kudacki/AP Photo)
Shan boys pray before they have their heads shaved in anticipation of their ordination in the Poy Song Long Ceremony at Wat Pa Pao in Chiang Mai, Thailand on April 3, 2018. Poy Sang Long (“The Festival of the Crystal Sons”) is a ceremony that marks a rite of passage among the Buddhist Shan people in Myanmar and northern Thailand. Boys between seven and fourteen years of age are ordained as Buddhist novices during a three day ceremony. Before the ceremony starts the boys have their heads shaved. (Photo by Jack Kurtz/ZUMA Wire/Rex Features/Shutterstock)
Macro or Micro? Scientists’ pictures baffle our sense of scale. It began when Stephen Young, a geography professor at Salem State University in Massachusetts, tricked his biologist colleague Paul Kelly into thinking a satellite image was one of his electron microscope scans. Can you guess whether they are close-up or very far away? (Photo by Paul Kelly)
Artist Tsuneo Sanda was born in Osaka, Japan. He first came to Tokyo at age 23, and has been there ever since. He lives in a rural, residential town about 20km west of Tokyo with his wife, Sachicko, two sons, Kensaku and Sohei, and Vivian, their American Shorthair cat.
A kitten singed whiskers that survived the McKinney Fire hides in rocks in the Klamath National Forest northwest of Yreka, California, on July 31, 2022. The largest fire in California this year is forcing thousands of people to evacuate as it destroys homes and rips through the state's dry terrain, whipped up by strong winds and lightning storms. The McKinney Fire was zero percent contained, CalFire said, spreading more than 51,000 acres near the city of Yreka. (Photo by David McNew/AFP Photo)
Commuters wear protective face masks as they walk through a subway station, in Sao Paulo, Brazil, Wednesday, December 1, 2021, amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Brazil joined the widening circle of countries to report cases of the omicron variant. (Photo by Andre Penner/AP Photo)