According to a study by management consultants PwC, 95% of people in Germany are in favor of reducing packaging material to a minimum. Despite this, the mountain of packaging waste left behind every year continues to grow. One important reason for this increase is the rising number of one- and two-person households, which creates a greater demand for smaller packaging units. In addition, a growing proportion of fresh food is sold in pre-packaged trays, bags and containers. The dominant material for this is plastic. More than 3 million tons of this ends up as packaging waste every year. An avoidable waste of raw materials that leaves us with a lot of problems.

Photo: Philotheus Nisch

The underside of a rainbow butterfly's wing reveals a world of colors and patterns, but above all a filigree masterpiece of aerodynamics. The butterfly owes its bright color not to pigmentation, but to the special structure of the wing lamellae. The rainbow butterfly can only be found in Madagascar. There, its species is now threatened with extinction due to palm oil plantations. The photo, fragile and beautiful, stands for the vulnerability of this and many thousands of other species that are threatened by invasive agriculture worldwide.

Photo: Sebastian Mast

Las Vegas, the city of adventurers, is not the only place that lights up the desert. 60 kilometers to the southwest on the Californian side of the Mojave Desert, lies Ivanpah. In 2014 it went online as the worlds largest solar thermal power plant. 173,500 individually adjustable mirror units, known as heliostats, direct the sunlight to a tower that contains a heat absorber, which is used to drive a steam turbine. According to official figures, the three neighboring fields generate a total of 1079.2 GWh of electrical energy per year – enough to power 140,000 households. Critics of this type of power plant cite the large amount of space required, high construction costs and a severe impact on animals, especially birds.

Photo: Tom Hegen

Not an easy birth: Around 460 light years away from earth, a new star is forming. In this image, the so-called protostar L1527 is just 100,000 years old – and already larger than our entire solar system. The James Webb Space Telescope was able to take this spectacular image in 2022. The hourglass-shaped illuminated gas cloud feeds the stellar embryo with matter. The image provides the scientific team from NASA, ESA and the Canadian Space Agency with important insights, including into the past of our own solar system.

Photo: NASA

In English they say you can’t compare apples and oranges; in other languages it’s apples and pears. Austrian photographer Lisa Edi has done it anyway—and creates a seemingly perfect unity of those fruits in her picture. She is by no means alone in her idea of combining apples and pears. Back in the 1980s, an apple-pear hybrid was developed at the Max Planck ­Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Cologne, Germany. In her photo series Beyond Category, she turns a whole range of everyday concepts on their head by creating curious combinations—for instance of knitting needles with strings of gummy candy instead of yarn.

The way the light emanates from this strangely shaped creature seems almost unreal at first. But at second glance, you can recognize the form as a jellyfish, which seems to float effortlessly against the black background. As is the case for many see through animals, its transparency is a defense against enemies. Light—as in this photo— refracts through their bodies, confusing predators and potential prey alike. The jellyfish body is composed of two very thin layers of cells, the outer and inner skins epidermis and gastrodermis respectively. Between the two skins is the mesoglea, a jelly-like substance, meaning the jellyfish is composed of up to 95 percent water or more. By the way, at the TU Vienna, a technical university, researchers are working on a process to make other species transparent as well, which they hope will allow them to gain new insights into their biology and inner workings.

What at first appears to be a close-up of a reddish-brown diamond is actually a piece of old, discarded color negative film. New York artist William Miller gave it a new life for his 2014 project “Surface Tension.” He randomly crumpled up, cut and folded a hundred rolls of film from a scrapped photo project. By destroying his old project, Miller deprived the rolls of film of their original purpose, allowing him to create something completely different: sculptural, mystical objects that fascinate viewers in a whole new way due to their unconventional repurposing.

Many layers of materials and insulating fabrics: Aramide or Imide, aluminium on the outside: these suits can withstand a temperature of 1,000 degrees. A protection for steel workers.

The world's largest seed vault currently stores around 1.2 million seed samples from more than 4,000 different plant species from 249 countries around the world.

It does storm and rain, at least. Not with water, however, but rather with particles of matter that are hurled from the sun. The European Space Agency (ESA) monitors these types of weather escapades in space very closely in order to prevent damage. During a solar storm, the sun sends charged particles towards Earth that can destroy sensitive parts within satellites.

This unusual photo of a flock of sheep was produced by a technology called Neural Style Transfer—a series of algorithms that manipulate digital images until they take on the look or style of another image. Deep neural networks are used for this image transformation. The process works like this: two pictures—for instance a selfie and a famous painting—are deconstructed by being run through a network that has been trained to recognize objects in pictures. The pictures are broken down into various layers—one contains the style of each picture, another layer contains the contents and another just patterns or textures. These layers are then used to construct a new image. The results can be a selfie that looks like a famous painting, for instance—or a flock of sheep with an expressionistic touch.

The collective snapshot pays homage to the most enduring form of photography. The image that you see here is a compilation of dozens of such snapshots taken over the years, that I found and then layered on top of each other, over and over until at some point they formed a new abstraction: a tribute to our collective memory.