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Red Sea bannerfish (Heniochus intermedius), Red Sea, Egypt. The Red Sea bannerfish attains as maximum total length of 18 centimetres (7.1 in) and is native to the western Indian Ocean where it is found in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. It's associated with coral reefs where it is most frequently recorded as a solitary fish or in pairs, although large schools have been recorded. The juveniles form large schools, particularly in areas of deep reef where there is a low density of corals. They feed on both zooplankton and benthic invertebrates but the extent to which they feed on live coral has still to be determined. It is an oviparous species which forms monogamous pairs for spawning. It's collected for the aquarium trade but its collection is of a limited scale and is not believed to be a threat to the species population.

Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.

JOSEPH SMITH (1805–1844) | KUDOS365 HISTORY SERIES

Joseph Smith was an American religious leader and the founder of the Latter Day Saint movement, one of the most influential religious traditions to emerge from the United States. To his followers, he was a prophet called by God to restore the original Christian church. To his critics, he was a controversial and often authoritarian figure whose claims, financial ventures, secret plural marriages, and accumulation of political power generated repeated conflict. His brief life reshaped American religion and produced a movement that continued to grow and diversify long after his death.

Smith was born on December 23, 1805, in Sharon, Vermont, to Joseph Smith Sr. and Lucy Mack Smith. His family experienced recurring financial difficulties and eventually settled near Palmyra, New York. The region was then undergoing intense religious revivalism, with competing churches and traveling preachers seeking converts. Smith later said that this atmosphere left him uncertain about which church, if any, possessed religious truth.

According to the account Smith developed and shared with his followers, he experienced a vision in 1820 in which God and Jesus Christ appeared to him and instructed him not to join the existing churches. He later reported that on September 21, 1823, an angel named Moroni directed him to buried golden plates containing an ancient sacred record. Believers accept these events as divine revelations, while historians generally treat them as religious claims that cannot be independently verified.

In 1827, Smith married Emma Hale, who became an important participant in the early movement. Smith said that he translated the inscriptions on the plates through divine assistance. Scribes, including Emma and Oliver Cowdery, recorded the words he dictated. The resulting text, the Book of Mormon, was published in 1830. It presented an account of ancient peoples in the Americas and described the resurrected Jesus Christ appearing among them. The book became the foundational scripture of the new movement.

On April 6, 1830, Smith and several followers formally organized the Church of Christ, later named the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Smith taught that Christianity had fallen into a state of apostasy and that God had authorized him to restore priesthood authority, continuing revelation, and the original church. Converts were drawn to the movement’s confidence, communal purpose, and promise that ordinary people could receive spiritual gifts and participate in sacred history.

Hostility followed the growing church from New York to Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois. Some opposition arose from religious prejudice and fear of an unfamiliar faith. Other conflicts developed over the movement’s concentrated voting power, economic practices, land purchases, and Smith’s expanding religious and civic authority. Latter-day Saints faced harassment, destruction of property, armed attacks, and forced removal.

In Kirtland, Ohio, Smith supervised the construction of the movement’s first temple and introduced new teachings and ceremonies. He also helped establish a financial institution that failed during the economic crisis of 1837. The collapse cost many participants their savings and damaged confidence in his leadership. Dissent increased, and Smith left Ohio for Missouri.

Conflict in Missouri escalated into armed confrontation during 1838. Both Latter-day Saints and their opponents committed acts of violence, though the Saints suffered the greater collective punishment. Missouri governor Lilburn Boggs issued an order declaring that the Mormons must be driven from the state or “exterminated.” Smith was imprisoned for several months without being brought to trial before escaping custody in 1839. Thousands of displaced church members sought refuge in Illinois.

There, Smith and his followers established Nauvoo, which rapidly became one of Illinois’s largest communities. Smith served as the city’s mayor, chief judge, church president, and commander of the Nauvoo Legion, a large local militia. These overlapping positions enabled the Saints to defend themselves after years of persecution, but they also alarmed neighbors who believed Smith exercised excessive religious, political, and military power.

Smith’s theology continued to evolve. He introduced baptism on behalf of the dead, temple rituals, an expanded understanding of humanity’s relationship with God, and teachings about eternal families. He also secretly practiced plural marriage and authorized selected followers to do the same. Historical evidence establishes that Smith entered into numerous plural unions, although their precise number and the nature of every relationship remain debated. Some women were already civilly married, and at least one was fourteen years old. Emma Smith’s knowledge and acceptance of these relationships varied, and the practice caused deep personal and institutional conflict. The church publicly denied allegations of polygamy during Smith’s lifetime.

Smith also became increasingly involved in politics. After government officials failed to provide adequate compensation or protection for the Saints’ losses in Missouri, he announced his candidacy for president of the United States in 1844. His platform included a stronger federal role in protecting individual rights, prison reform, territorial expansion, and the gradual end of slavery through compensated emancipation. At the same time, he organized a private governing body known as the Council of Fifty, which reflected his expansive vision of religious and political authority.

The final crisis began when former associates published the Nauvoo Expositor, a newspaper criticizing Smith’s power and exposing plural marriage. Smith and the Nauvoo City Council declared the newspaper a public nuisance and ordered its press destroyed. The action intensified existing opposition and led to charges against Smith. After briefly leaving Nauvoo, he returned and surrendered to authorities. He and his brother Hyrum were held in the jail at Carthage, Illinois, while awaiting legal proceedings.

On June 27, 1844, an armed mob stormed the jail. Smith used a pistol that had been given to him to defend himself, but both brothers were shot and killed. Joseph Smith was thirty-eight years old. His murder was the culmination of years of religious persecution, political conflict, mutual fear, and escalating violence; it was also an unlawful act that denied him the judicial process he was awaiting.

Smith’s death produced a succession crisis that divided the movement. Most followers eventually accepted Brigham Young’s leadership and migrated west to the Great Salt Lake Valley. Other groups followed different leaders, including Smith’s son Joseph Smith III, who later headed the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, now known as Community of Christ.

Joseph Smith remains both revered and disputed. His followers view him as a prophet who restored sacred authority and revealed new scripture. Critics emphasize his secrecy, plural marriages, failed financial ventures, and concentration of power. Whatever judgment is made about his religious claims, his historical importance is unmistakable. From modest beginnings in rural New York, he created a durable religious movement, produced an extensive body of scripture and teachings, founded communities, and altered the course of American religious history.

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Did You Know? | Kudos 365 Curiosity Series

1. An ordinary cloud can contain about 500 tons of water.
Clouds may look almost weightless, but a typical cumulus cloud about one cubic kilometer in volume can contain roughly 500,000 kilograms—about 1.1 million pounds—of water droplets. Those droplets are extraordinarily small and dispersed through an enormous volume of air, allowing the cloud to remain suspended.

2. Cleopatra life span was closer to the Moon landing than to the building of the Great Pyramid.
The Great Pyramid of Giza was completed around 2560 BCE. Cleopatra VII lived in the first century BCE, while Apollo 11 landed on the Moon in 1969. Cleopatra therefore lived roughly 2,500 years after the Great Pyramid was built but only about 2,000 years before humans walked on the Moon. Ancient Egypt lasted far longer than our mental picture of “ancient times” sometimes suggests.

3. Your body contains enough blood vessels to circle Earth more than twice.
The arteries, veins, and tiny capillaries of the human body form an extraordinary transportation network. Their combined length in an adult is commonly estimated at about 60,000 miles. Earth's circumference is roughly 25,000 miles, so stretched end to end, those vessels could circle the planet more than twice.

4. The world's largest living structure was built by tiny animals.
Australia's Great Barrier Reef extends approximately 1,400 miles (2,300 kilometers) and consists of nearly 3,000 individual reefs. Its builders are coral polyps—small marine animals that produce hard calcium-carbonate skeletons. Generation after generation, their activity contributes to the enormous reef structures we see today.

5. The shortest recorded war lasted less than an hour.
On August 27, 1896, Britain and the Sultanate of Zanzibar fought what is generally regarded as the shortest recorded war. Accounts differ slightly on its exact duration, but the Anglo-Zanzibar War lasted only about 40 minutes. A dispute over succession to the sultanate had escalated into an extraordinarily brief military conflict.

6. Trees may be older than Saturn's rings—but scientists aren't certain.
Trees appeared hundreds of millions of years ago. For some time, evidence from NASA's Cassini mission supported estimates that Saturn's rings might be only a few hundred million years old. More recent research, however, has challenged an important method used to reach that conclusion and leaves open the possibility that the rings are billions of years old. So the appealing claim that “trees are older than Saturn's rings” remains possible, but it should not currently be treated as established fact.

7. The dot over a lowercase “i” or “j” has a name.
It's called a tittle. The word refers to a small point or mark used in writing or printing and has been used in English for centuries. It is one of those familiar things most of us see every day without ever wondering whether it has a name.

8. Earth's tectonic plates move about as fast as your fingernails grow.
The continents appear stationary during a human lifetime, but the enormous tectonic plates carrying them are continually moving. Typical rates are only a few centimeters each year—roughly comparable to fingernail growth. Over millions of years, however, those tiny movements can open oceans, build mountains, and rearrange continents.

Sometimes the familiar world becomes much more interesting when we look a little closer: Explore. Discover. Learn.

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NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Did you need to be on the right side of this airplane to see this eclipse? No. Lunar eclipses are routinely seen from the half of the Earth facing the Moon when the eclipse occurs, making them some of the most commonly witnessed astronomical events. You don't even need any special equipment to see one -- just your unaided eyes. Lunar eclipses are also some of the most photographed astronomical events because, unlike with a solar eclipse, your eyes and camera do not have to look toward the bright Sun. However, considering the featured image taken last week from Portugal, if you were on the left side of that airplane during takeoff, you might have trouble seeing it -- at first. But even then, after takeoff, since lunar eclipses typically last for hours, you might soon be able to safely cross the aisle(s) to see it. Gallery: Lunar Eclipse of 2026 August APOD's main NASA site is moving: From apod.nasa.gov to science.nasa.gov/apod

The shipwreck of Cabo de Santa Maria in Boa Vista, Cape Verde as it appeared in December 2010. The Spanish cargo ship ran aground at Praia de Atalanta beach on this date in 1968.

Ximonic (Simo Räsänen), CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

A new telescope has been launched into space to study the universe. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (RST) has the same size main mirror as the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) but sees 100 times more sky during each snapshot. This is possible because when compared to HST, RST's main mirror is more curved, its secondary mirror is closer, and its main camera is larger. The result is that RST can inspect more of the sky more quickly, likely allowing, among other capabilities, the discovery of many more supernovas which tell us more about the expansion rate and composition of our universe, and many more planets orbiting other stars that tell us more about the possibilities for life elsewhere in the universe. RST will orbit the Sun, not the Earth, like the James Webb Space Telescope. The featured video shows Roman being launched yesterday from Kennedy Space Center, Florida, USA aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. APOD's main NASA site is moving: From apod.nasa.gov to science.nasa.gov/apod

Watch NASA's Astronomy Video of the Day

Eleanor Roosevelt (October 11 1884 - November 7 1962) - First Lady, Humanitarian, and Champion of Human Rights. Biography

Devonshire Lodge (Low-Martin House), Windsor, Ontario, Canada. Commissioned by the rum-runner Harry Low in 1927, the building was designed in the style of a Cotswold cottage and completed in 1928. It served as the home of Member of Parliament Paul Martin Sr. for almost three decades. It was designated under the Ontario Heritage Act in 2008.

Chris Woodrich, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.