Snowflakes provide many of us with our earliest impressions of what it means to be unique. Even within a group—the flakes so numerous as to be seemingly uncountable—no two, we were told, are exactly ...

No two snowflakes are alike, and that’s even more true in the arctic temperatures we are seeing this week. These photos capture up-close images of snowflakes that fell recently in Kansas City.

The specific number of snowflake types depends on who you ask. Photographer Wilson Alwyn Bentley took pictures of thousands of snowflakes and categorized them into 35 categories. Ukichiro Nakaya ...