At the foot of striking marble quarries in central Italy’s Apuan Alps sits the village of Colonnata (pictured above) – a quaint place famed for its pork lard and quarry workers. The stone extracted from outside the nearby city of Carrara, including from the white marble quarry in the image below, is widely regarded as the purest and most valuable in the world.

Before modern technology, enormous blocks of marble were transported down the mountainside manually with cables, ropes and a sled in a method known as “lizzatura”, as recreated in the image below.

“Since the time of the Roman Empire, the marble was considered the best in the world,” says photographer Alessandro Gandolfi, who documented the story of the highly sought-after material in his project Land of Marble. “The best sculptors in the world, like Michelangelo, came personally to choose these marbles for their sculptures.”

Several centuries after the Italian Renaissance, marble remains a staple material for artists. In the image aboove, students at Carrara’s Academy of Fine Arts first hone their sculpting skills on clay.

Beyond its use in art, Carrara’s marble is often pulverised and used as calcium carbonate to make products such as paper, paint, fertiliser and toothpaste.

But the extraction of marble isn’t without impact on the environment. “We are extracting a little bit too much marble today,” says Gandolfi. “If we keep going at this rate, you will see the mountains totally destroyed in 500 years’ time.”

Slowly cracking through the dense pack ice of Antarctica’s Weddell Sea is hefty, ice-breaking research vessel S. A. Agulhas II (pictured below). It was part of Endurance22, a successful 2022 expedition to locate the sunken ship of explorer Ernest Shackleton.

Endurance went down in 1915 after it was trapped by pack ice during its first voyage – leaving him and his crew of 27 men stranded, with little hope of rescue. “The story of survival of Shackleton and the crew of the Endurance is a legendary feat of leadership, grit, determination and perseverance against all the odds,” says Nico Vincent, deputy leader of the . In their new book Endurance, he and the wreck mission leader John Shears detail the search for the lost ship.

A stunning bird’s-eye view (pictured above) shows members of Endurance22’s subsea team edging a returning underwater autonomous vehicle into position at the vessel’s stern before heaving it onboard again.

But, fittingly, centre stage (above) is taken by an amazing mosaic of over 25,000 images of the wreck itself. It reveals an incredibly well-preserved ship, its masts, anchors and steam engine funnel all still present, while the hull is also intact, resting upright on the seabed. Shears and Vincent hope the story of the ship will offer a fresh perspective on the epic tale for a new generation.

Endurance: The discovery of Shackleton’s legendary ship by John Shears and Nico Vincent is published on 5 November

A snapshot of a delicate web of tumour cells inside a mouse’s brain has clinched the top prize in this year’s Nikon Small World photography competition, which celebrates microscopy.

Tightly packed, upright strands of a protein known as actin border each cell, which contain green jumbles of tiny tubes, called microtubules, that surround a violet nucleus.

at Augusta University in Georgia, who took the photo, is exploring whether the breakdown of the structures around nuclei could influence the development of neurodegenerative conditions, such as Alzheimer’s disease.

“One of the main problems with neurodegenerative diseases is that we don’t fully understand what causes them,” he said in a statement. “To develop effective treatments, we need to figure out the basics first.”

Maroon-coloured fruiting bodies of slime moulds, belonging to the species Cribraria cancellata, glisten in another entry, taken by at the University of Helsinki in Finland. A dainty net of thick threads, known as a peridium, encloses a clump of spores.

Photographer Gerhard Vlcek captured this vibrant cross-section of European beachgrass (Ammophila arenaria), taken from the Austrian city of Maria Enzersdorf. The turquoise tubes adjacent to the plant’s orange tissue are vascular bundles made up of xylem and phloem, which carry water and food.

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The azure flecks on the end of this syringe needle are miniature scales from the wings of a Ulysses butterfly (Papilio ulysses). Each scale can be as small as 30 micrometres in length. The astonishing shot was taken by photographer Daniel Knop in Germany.

PaweƂ BƂachowicz in Poland got up close and personal with a green crab spider (Diaea dorsata) to capture this intimate photo of its eight eyes. This species is no more than 6 millimetres across.

This wonderfully neon image of two translucent water fleas (Daphnia sp.) was taken by Marek Miƛ in Poland. The one on the left is filled with embryos, while its companion is replete with eggs.

Vascular bundles form an expressive smile in this cross-section of a common bracken (Pteridium aquilinum) stem, taken by David Maitland in the UK.

Scarlet plumes of hydrogen emanate from the lively cosmic portrait of the galaxy Messier 82 (M82) shown above. Also known as the cigar galaxy, it sits in the constellation Ursa Major, around 12 million light years away.

It is what is known as a starburst galaxy due to its remarkably high rate of star formation. In fact, for every star born in the Milky Way, 10 burst into existence in M82. The reason for this much greater activity lies in M82’s gravitational interactions with a neighbouring galaxy known as M81.

The fantastic image here is the sharpest wide-angle view of M82 ever captured. It was assembled using shots taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope in both infrared and visible wavelengths of light.

Glowing with an ethereal beauty is the Cat’s Eye Nebula, or NGC 6543, (pictured above) which was also imaged by Hubble. It is a planetary nebula. Despite the name, these are nothing to do with planets, but form when sun-like stars vigorously expel their outer layers of gas to form a spectacular display. This nebula’s concentric, pastel-coloured rings are shells of material emitted in a series of pulses, with around 1500 years between each event.

Both these magnificent scenes feature in the upcoming book , out on 3 October.

“I hope readers will take away both a sense of wonder at how incredible, vast and beautiful our universe is,” says astrophysicist Becky Smethurst, who wrote the book’s foreword, “but also a sense of how much there is that we still don’t know about our universe.”