Images are projected onto the Empire State Building as part of an endangered species projection to raise awareness, in New York August 1, 2015. (Photo by Eduardo Munoz/Reuters)

A giant river otter, the world's largest otter species, looks out of its enclosure at the newly completed River Safari in Singapore, on March 25, 2013. (Photo by Wong Maye-E/Associated Press)

Stemonitis axifera is a species of slime mold. It fruits in clusters on dead wood, and has distinctive tall reddish-brown sporangia, supported on slender stalks. The species was first described as Trichia axifera by Jean Baptiste François Pierre Bulliard in 1791. Thomas Huston MacBride transferred it to the genus Stemonitis in 1889. Stemonitis fasciculata and Stemonitis smithii are synonyms.

Whenever we don’t have enough magic in our real life, we try to create it using our imagination. The cute characters created by Belgian illustrator Marie Breuer allow us to see the mystical world that resides within her mind. It is dark and adorable, enchanting and solemn. The thing that separates her drawings from the rest is the vivid colors and the bizarre huge, anime-like heads of her characters. The pictures that we liked the most were the ones where her characters wear different living animals like cloaks, with the mood of the characters being closely linked to the animal that they are wearing. (Photo by Marie Breuer)

Allyson Anne Lamb is a Brooklyn based fine artist primarily working in photography. Her work uses the body to explore the complexity of human emotions and the continuous invisible transformations we experience, revealing them as monstrosities or fantastical beings. Through the assembling of body parts, bright colors and fictional spaces that exist in Lamb's magical realm where sexual anxiety, female identity and altered sensorial perceptions are explored, Lamb invites us to participate in an altered state of consciousness. We step in to quaint fragmented realities where we are welcomed to engage in lucid dreaming populated by colorful mutations.

We – Verena Popp-Hackner and Georg Popp - are professional landscape photographers. While we are based in Vienna/Austria, running our own (rights managed) image library and a small but fine photo-gallery. Photographing our tiny country Austria, with all it's culture and nature, canoeing it's rivers or lakes and hiking the Alps is our profession but our photographic “backyard” includes the rest of the planet as well. We use analog large format cameras almost exclusively for our landscape work, shooting on 4x5” sheet film, to provide clients with the maximum of print-sharpness and details and unsurpassed clarity and depth of focus.

Several new species of peacock spider – just a few millimetres long and featuring extraordinary colours – have been discovered in Western Australia and South Australia. Jürgen Otto, a biologist from Sydney, has been researching the arachnids since 2005, and has gained a significant following online with his footage. He believes there are now 48 confirmed species of peacock spider within the Maratus genus, found across Australia but particularly in Western Australia – and many more awaiting confirmation. Here: Maratus Tasmanicus, one of seven new species of peacock spiders studied by the Sydney biologist Jürgen Otto. (Photo by Jürgen Otto)

Winner. “This was taken in the South Ari Atolls, Maldives, as the south-west monsoon season was setting in. It features my partner – and dive buddy – Emma after surfacing at the end of the last dive of the day to find 1.5 metre swells and dark monsoon clouds. MICK RYAN, JUDGE: This beautiful portrait of a diver in an ocean swell below a menacing sky stands out this month for its emotional and elemental beauty. It is a reminder that while we may play among nature we are always dwarfed by its power and must be constantly on our guard”. (Photo by Simon Dunn/The Guardian)