Beautiful, strange and occasionally alarming pictures from the shortlist for this year’s Wellcome image awards – which celebrate the very best in science photography and imaging – from an x-ray of a bat to a micrograph of a kidney stone. The exhibition opens on 12 March at three science centres and the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester. Photo: Scanning electron micrograph (SEM) of an Arabidopsis thaliana flower, also commonly known as thale cress. Some of the anthers are open, revealing pollen grains ready for dispersal. Arabidopsis was the first plant to have its entire genome sequenced and is widely used as a model organism in molecular and plant biology. Horizontal width of image is 1200 microns. Magnification 100x. (Photo by Stefan Eberhard/Wellcome Images)

Deputies of the opposition fight with deputies of the majority for a second time in two days, during the second session of the newly elected Ukrainian parliament in Kiev on December 13, 2012. (Photo by Sergei Supinsky/AFP Photo)

Face Off is an American reality television game show on the Syfy cable network in which a group of prosthetic makeup artists compete against each other to create prostheses such as those found in science fiction and horror films.

Since his childhood, Czech artist Jan Patrik Krasny has been attracted to the dynamic style of comics, which has heavily influenced his science-fiction and fantasy illustrations. His collection features beautifully detailed images that are full of imagination.

“The finless porpoise (Neophocaena phocaenoides) is one of six porpoise species. In the waters around Japan, at the northern end of its range, it is known as the sunameri. A freshwater population found in the Yangtze River in China is known locally as the jiangzhu or «river pig»”. – Wikipedia

Photo: A newly born Yangtze finless porpoise (top) swims with his mother at the Hydrobiology Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences on June 3, 2007 in Wuhan of Hubei Province, China. (Photo by China Photos/Getty Images)

Spanish actor Antonio Banderas embraces a robot used in the film Automata during a photocall on the third day of the 62nd San Sebastian Film Festival, September 21, 2014. Banderas stars in and produced the science fiction film, which is part of the festival's official section. (Photo by Vincent West/Reuters)

HRP-4C, a five-foot humanoid robot developed at Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, sings and dances with performers at the Digital Contents Expo in Tokyo on October 17, 2010. The robot runs entertainment software called Choreonoid, a name formed from the words “choreograph” and “humanoid”. (Yoshikazu Tsuno/AFP)

In this Thursday, June 14, 2018, file photo, students wear virtual reality goggles during a science class at Pyongyang Teachers' University, a teacher training college, in Pyongyang, North Korea. (Photo by Dita Alangkara/AP Photo)