Zika in Cuba

Credit: Desmond Boylan for Nature

Clouds of pesticide, such as this one, regularly waft through Cuba’s neighbourhoods. It is one of the measures that has kept the Zika virus at bay, although the disease has now arrived even in Cuba. Desmond Boylan, who accompanied Nature reporter Sara Reardon on a recent trip to the island, took this shot earlier in 2016.

Burning problem

Credit: Noah Berger/AP/Press Association

Drought in California is becoming an annual occurrence, which means that devastating wildfires are too. In this 17 August photo, embers from a blaze are seen near Keenbrook.

Water damage

Credit: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

While California longs for rain, people in other parts of the United States are cursing devastating floods. Thousands fled rising water levels in Louisiana this month, shown here at Denham Springs in the state. Several people have been killed and a state of emergency has been declared.

Ultimate disco

Credit: Nature Methods

Ali Ertürk at the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich in Germany and his colleagues have created a technique called ultimate DISCO which removes pigments and lipids from the tissues of dead animals. Their method also shrinks bodies by up to 65%, making it possible to image whole animals using a technique called light-sheet microscopy.

Borderlands

Credit: Davide Gaglio

Davide Gaglio captured this sunrise at Kgalagadi Park, which lies on the border between South Africa, Botswana and Namibia. It won the overall prize in the BMC Ecology Image Competition 2016.

DNA labyrinth

Credit: G. Pardatscher/TUM

This labyrinth is made of closely packed DNA molecules, created on a biochip by a team who have developed a method to make one-dimensional fibres 20 nanometres wide and 70 micrometres long.

Hidden Degas

Credit: Thurrowgood, D. et al./Scientific Reports

Researchers probing the circa 1880s Portrait of a Woman by Edgar Degas with X-rays have revealed another woman’s portrait under the oil paint.

Microbial menagerie

Environmental microbiologist Marilyn Roossinck presents the story of 101 viruses in her recently published book, and shows portraits of them in electron-microscopy images that Nature’s reviewer found “have more than a passing resemblance to the paintings of Jackson Pollock and Wassily Kandinsky”.

Blooming corpse

This time-lapse video shows the New York Botanical Gardens’ Amorphophallus titanum coming into bloom and then collapsing. Although it looks pretty, this huge blossom is called the corpse flower for a reason – it stinks to high heaven.