Exceeding glorious Father and Lord, who deckest thyself with light as with a garment; who spreadest out the heavens like a curtain: mighty creator of this and every world, of all stars and planets in their courses: We thy children render unto thee our praise and honour for the wonder of thy handiwork — for the beauty of creation, and at this season most especially for the blessing of new life and hope, visible in the face of our mother the earth as she awakens to Spring. In her awakening we see Christ triumphant over death. In her we see the rejoicing of St Mary Magdalen, first witness of the Resurrection. In her we see the fruitfulness of our most blessèd and glorious Lady the Virgin Mary — through whom thou hast given us the Light of the World, the light that shineth in darkness, the Word Made Flesh. As City and Universities, in unity and concord, we celebrate before thee today the birth of an earthly morning. We pray thee, use the beauty of this creation to knit our hearts to the things that endure to eternity, that we may rejoice at the dawning of the endless day of the kingdom of thy Son, our Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen.

You can listen to the whole thing here:

‘Tom Llamas sits down with Savannah Bananas founder Jesse Cole, who is changing the face of America’s favorite pastime. From players pitching on stilts, to backflip catches, even breaking out into song and dance right in the batter’s box. It’s all part of his mission to make baseball more fun, family-friendly and affordable – and its popularity spans generations.’

A sperm whale giving birth has been assisted by 10 other females in her social unit – the first time such an event has ever been observed in non-primates.

In July 2023, scientists who have been monitoring a group of sperm whales in the Caribbean since 2005 noticed that all 11 females in the group had gathered near the surface. By chance, the researchers had drones in the air and were able to observe and record the event.

Shortly afterwards, the flukes of a calf started emerging from its mother. The delivery took place over the next half hour, during which the other females coordinated themselves into a highly synchronised formation to protect the mother and newborn.

As soon as the calf was born, the female whales gathered around and took turns making sure that it was kept lifted at the surface so it could breathe and had time for its flukes to fully unfurl. In the first few hours, newborn sperm whales aren’t buoyant and cannot stay at the surface on their own, so such assistance is thought to be critical to prevent calves from drowning.

“This is the first evidence of birth assistance in non-primates,” says team member Shane Gero at Project CETI in New York.

Read it all.

Teamwork helped make this sperm whale birth a success. And scientists caught it on camera.https://t.co/DiApcaLBAm

— Science News (@ScienceNews) March 26, 2026

Christians are celebrating the feast day of Epiphany, also known as Three Kings Day. It recalls the visit of the three kings, or magi, to the baby Jesus. Orthodox Christians focus on the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist.

In Europe, some worshippers bathe in icy lakes and rivers. Ceremonies this year in Greece highlighted water scarcity concerns. Children in Latin America traditionally unwrap holiday gifts.

Read it all.

This is how children in Europe celebrate the Feast of the Three Kings, also known as Epiphany.

Image: Franz Lackner pic.twitter.com/7lYhlJW8Wm

— Sachin Jose (@Sachinettiyil) January 7, 2025

Most high, omnipotent, good Lord, grant unto thy people grace to renounce gladly the vanities of this world; that, following the way of blessed Francis, we may for love of thee delight in thy whole creation with perfectness of joy; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

Jane Goodall, one of the world’s most revered conservationists, who earned scientific stature and global celebrity by chronicling the distinctive behavior of wild chimpanzees in East Africa — primates that made and used tools, ate meat, held rain dances and engaged in organized warfare — died on Wednesday in Los Angeles. She was 91.

Her death, while on a speaking tour, was confirmed by the Jane Goodall Institute, whose U.S. headquarters are in Washington, D.C. When not traveling widely, she lived in Bournemouth, on the south coast of England, in her childhood home.

Dr. Goodall was 29 in the summer of 1963 when National Geographic magazine published her 7,500-word, 37-page account of the lives of primates she had observed in the Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve in what is now Tanzania. The National Geographic Society had been financially supporting her field studies there.

The article, with photographs by Hugo van Lawick, a Dutch wildlife photographer whom she later married, also described Dr. Goodall’s struggles to overcome disease, predators and frustration as she tried to get close to the chimps, working from a primitive research station along the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika.

Read it all.

She lived a great, impactful life, and inspired me to study primate behavior. Stephen Jay Gould called her work one of the Western world's greatest scientific achievements. Jane Goodall, Eminent Primatologist Who Chronicled the Lives of Chimps, Dies at 91 https://t.co/bXbmX0ueqh

— Michael Platt (@MichaelLouisPl1) October 1, 2025

A potentially invasive crab species has landed in coastal South Carolina, from Hilton Head, though the Charleston area and up to Myrtle Beach.

State regulators are asking the public to report sightings of blue land crabs, which can cause damage to crops and other animals by digging deep holes in search of water.

Historically found in Brazil, the Caribbean and South Florida, blue land crabs are thicker and bulkier than the blue crabs found in coastal waters and served in local restaurants. Despite their name, they range in shades of blue and purple to orange and have one claw that’s larger than the other.

The burrowing creatures resemble a “fiddler crab on steroids,” said S.C. Department of Natural Resources crustacean researcher Daniel Sasson.

For a long time, it was thought the crabs’ northernmost range was the middle of Florida, Sasson said. That has changed.

Read it all.

‘Fiddler crab on steroids’: SC agency on the lookout for a new invasive (and edible) species https://t.co/WvvYRopXRa

— The Post and Courier (@postandcourier) September 2, 2025

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory on Monday released its first dazzling images of deep space in a preview of the cosmic movie the pioneering probe was built to create.

The U.S.-funded observatory, perched in an area of the Chilean Andes known for exceptionally dark skies, is equipped with the world’s largest digital camera and a 27.5-foot mirror that can capture light too faint for other telescopes to see. 

Together, the photos will create a dynamic time-lapse record of the southern sky—essentially a vast celestial flipbook that is expected to document 38 billion objects, from galaxies and stars to black holes and supernovae.

The project, dubbed the Legacy Survey of Space and Time, is slated to begin later this year. It will advance four science goals: inventorying the solar system, mapping the Milky Way, cataloging billions of transient space objects and unlocking the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy. No previous telescope has peered this far and wide into space. 

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The Vera C. Rubin Observatory on Monday released its first dazzling images of deep space snapped with the world's largest digital camera. @GaripPatricia reports for #WSJScience https://t.co/KEjkYow62t via @WSJ

— Jo Craven McGinty (@mcjomcg) June 23, 2025

Leading scientists have launched an international campaign to stop the creation of synthetic bacteria that could threaten life on earth.

Eminent researchers at a landmark gathering in Paris urged international action to prevent the emergence of so-called mirror life — manufactured microbes that they fear could overwhelm the immune defences of humans, other animals and plants. 

The scale of the danger was still hard to predict but could affect “the preponderance of life as we know it today on this planet”, David Relman, a microbiologist and immunologist at Stanford University, told the Financial Times on the sidelines of the event. “There is a scenario in which a future mirror organism becomes a widely pervasive invasive species and displaces and disrupts many critical ecosystems across the planet — including our own,” he said. “We have to be concerned about the possibility of an extreme, potentially existential, threat.”

Read it all.

Scientists rush to stop mirror microbes that could threaten life on earth https://t.co/Smbs2Nt64o

— Financial Times (@FT) June 13, 2025

Of the more than 200 wildfires incinerating Canadian forests — and sending smoke into the United States — more than half are burning “out of control,” and some are being monitored but allowed to burn, Canadian authorities said.

As fires intensify, so do concerns over air quality. But conditions on the ground mean that suppressing many of the fires swiftly is not realistic, authorities and researchers say.

Although Canadian authorities have mobilized a “full response” to most of the fires, which means firefighters are actively trying to suppress them, the majority are expected to continue growing, and some are being observed and analyzed without an immediate response, the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Center (CIFFC) said.

Severe winds and smoke complicate suppression efforts, significantly impairing visibility, and remote areas with tall flames pose significant challenges for the deployment of firefighters, according to wildfire researchers in Canada.

Read it all.

Why are so many of Canada’s wildfires burning ‘out of control’? https://t.co/7xAetrrZ7i

— Carlos A. Moreno (@CarlosAMoreno) June 5, 2025

Christians around the world are celebrating Easter.

All Christians, from Orthodox and Western churches, are observing the holiday on the same day this year – not often the case because the churches use different calendars.

In Greece, the sky lit up with fireworks, while worshippers in Jerusalem lit candles at the church where Jesus is said to have been crucified and buried. Christians believe Jesus rose from the dead, which is remembered at Easter.

Here is a look at how some have been celebrating the holiday as days of festivities culminate in Easter Sunday.

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In pictures: Easter celebrated around the world from Greece to Iraq https://t.co/kK2brsmn7I

— BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) April 20, 2025

The human brain is so complex that scientific brains have a hard time making sense of it. A piece of neural tissue the size of a grain of sand might be packed with hundreds of thousands of cells linked together by miles of wiring. In 1979, Francis Crick, the Nobel-prize-winning scientist, concluded that the anatomy and activity in just a cubic millimeter of brain matter would forever exceed our understanding.

“It is no use asking for the impossible,” Dr. Crick wrote.

Forty-six years later, a team of more than 100 scientists has achieved that impossible, by recording the cellular activity and mapping the structure in a cubic millimeter of a mouse’s brain — less than one percent of its full volume. In accomplishing this feat, they amassed 1.6 petabytes of data — the equivalent of 22 years of nonstop high-definition video.

“This is a milestone,” said Davi Bock, a neuroscientist at the University of Vermont who was not involved in the study, which was published Wednesday in the journal Nature. Dr. Bock said that the advances that made it possible to chart a cubic millimeter of brain boded well for a new goal: mapping the wiring of the entire brain of a mouse.

Read it all.

An Advance in Brain Research That Was Once Considered Impossible https://t.co/peoDcslro2

Scientists achieved “a milestone” by charting the activity and structure of 200,000 cells in a mouse brain and their 523 million connections.

— Paul Higgins (@futuristpaul) April 9, 2025

Here’s the NBC blurb-‘The revolution of smart bird feeders equipped with cameras are giving a whole new meaning to “bird’s eye view,” and sparking a renewed interest in bird watching with the beautiful images they capture. NBC News’ Hallie Jackson has the story.’

It started as a series of jokes.

Matt Nelson began posting one-liners on X, formerly Twitter, in 2015 to test his comedic chops.

“I noticed that all of my jokes that had to do with dogs just did way better than my other jokes,” said Nelson, then a college freshman at Campbell University in Buies Creek, North Carolina.

That sparked an idea.

“If the entire internet loves dogs, and so do I, and I have a knack for writing humorously about them, then I should start a new account,” said Nelson, who grew up in Charleston, West Virginia.

Read it all.

This man rates dogs for a living. He has millions of loyal followers. https://t.co/gAJ7wJ5KHZ

— Jack Rogers (@Inpsycful) March 20, 2025

With egg prices in the United States soaring because of the spread of H5N1 influenza virus among poultry, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) yesterday conditionally approved a vaccine to protect the birds. President Donald Trump’s administration may therefore soon face a fraught decision on whether to join the ranks of other nations—including China, France, Egypt, and Mexico—that vaccinate poultry against H5N1.

Although many influenza researchers contend that vaccination can help control spread of the deadly virus, the U.S. government has long resisted allowing its use because of politics and trade concerns that many contend are unscientific. The USDA approval may signal a shift in policy linked to the Trump administration’s worries about egg prices. Even with the conditional approval, USDA must still approve its use before farmers can start to administer the vaccine because special regulations apply to H5N1 and other so-called highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) viruses.

The vaccine, made by Zoetis, contains a killed version of an H5N2 variant that the company has designed to work against circulating variants of the H5N1 virus that have decimated poultry flocks and have even jumped to cows and some humans. (The “H” in both variants stands for hemagglutinin, the surface protein of the virus, and antibodies against it are the main mechanism of vaccine-induced protection.) Researchers at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported yesterday that three cow veterinarians harbored antibodies to the H5N1 virus in dairy cattle. None had symptomatic disease, they noted in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, suggesting the virus may be more widespread in humans than previously thought.

Read it all.

With egg prices in the United States soaring because of the spread of H5N1 influenza virus among poultry, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has conditionally approved a vaccine to protect the birds. https://t.co/ArHRIgkmL5

— News from Science (@NewsfromScience) February 14, 2025

Nigel Richards is the reigning world champion of Scrabble in Spanish. Just don’t ask him to order a coffee in Madrid. The 57-year-old New Zealander doesn’t speak a lick of Spanish. 

During the deciding match in November’s Spanish World Scrabble Championship in Granada, Spain, Richards racked up triple-word scores with ENRUGASE (“to wrinkle up”) and ENHOTOS (an archaic word for “familiarity”), before clinching victory with TRINIDAD and SABURROSA (an obscure word that describes the coated residue of the tongue). 

Not that Richards knew the meaning of any of those words. 

One Spanish TV broadcaster called his win the “ultimate humiliation.” The global Scrabble community wasn’t so surprised. Richards had done this before—in French. 

Read it all.

How good is Scrabble’s GOAT? He wins in languages he can’t speak. “He memorizes words as soon as he reads them once…For him, all words are equal in his memory, and he doesn’t need to know their meaning." https://t.co/BzfRLNqVCH via @WSJ @natasha_dangoor

— Gráinne McCarthy (@grainnemcc) February 10, 2025

Homeowners in places most exposed to climate disasters are increasingly giving up on paying their insurance premiums, leaving them exposed to financial ruin, according to sweeping new government data.

The numbers show how climate change is eroding the underpinnings of American life by making home insurance costlier and harder to hang on to, even as wildfires, hurricanes and other calamities increasingly threaten what is, for many people, their most valuable asset.

“Homeowners’ insurance is where many Americans are now feeling the financial effect of climate change directly, in their pocketbook,” said Ethan Zindler, climate counselor at the Treasury Department. “Nature doesn’t really care whether people are living in a blue state or a red state or another state, or whether you do or don’t believe in climate change.”

The rising cancellation rates are part of a broader trend captured by the Treasury Department, which analyzed information for 246 million insurance policies issued by 330 insurers nationwide from 2018 through 2022. The result is the most comprehensive look yet at the effect of climate change on the American home insurance market.

Read it all.

More Americans, Risking Ruin, Drop Their Home Insurance https://t.co/kZjPynDbIU

— Heather Croshaw (@HeatherCroshaw) January 17, 2025

In a time of instability and uncertainty, what does God say to his people? I created you (bara), formed you (yatsar), and called you (qara). This is the very same language we read in Genesis when, in the beginning, God creates (bara) the heavens and the earth (1:1), forms (yatsar) the human from the dust of the ground (2:7), and calls (qara) the light “day” and the darkness “night” (1:5). In other words, God reminds Israel that they have quite literally been made for such a time as this.

And what kind of time is this exactly? According to Isaiah 43, it’s a time in which the people of Israel will be passing through flood waters and traversing rising rivers and navigating uncontrolled fires—each of which threatens to overwhelm them at every turn. One would think that the prophet would bring a more reassuring message, especially to a people who longed for nothing more than to go back to the stability and security they knew prior to the Exile.

But that’s not what they get. Instead, God speaks through the prophet Isaiah with this message: There is no going back to a time of stability or security or certainty. There are only cataclysmic waters and catastrophic fires ahead. In fact, for Israel, it is not a matter of if they will encounter these scenarios. It is only a matter of when.

It is therefore all the more significant that, having painted this harrowing picture of what’s to come, God still has the audacity to say, “Don’t be afraid.”

Read it all.

"All we can do is mourn with those who mourn, open our homes to those who have lost everything, and hold on to the hope that God will be with us as we walk through these fires…" – Brehm's Kutter Callawayhttps://t.co/bzEuH8Wym3 pic.twitter.com/kgkLtKBOeQ

— Brehm Center (@brehmcenter) January 15, 2025

O Sovereign Lord, Creator of heaven and earth, whose mighty hand holds back the waters and commands the elements according to Your will; look with mercy upon our land now threatened by devastating fires, and stretch forth Your hand to protect Your people. Shield the brave firefighters and first responders who risk their lives in service to others, grant them wisdom and strength in their labors, and surround them with Your divine protection. Send Your refreshing rains to quench these flames, calm the winds that drive them, and preserve both life and property from destruction; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who with You and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, now and forever. Amen.

Fire Chief Stephen Freeman has lived in Bat Cave, North Carolina, for more than six decades. He’s seen severe and deadly weather events. But he’d never seen anything like the force of water that swept through the southern Appalachians in September of last year. He said he’s also experienced God’s presence and the love of God’s people in amazing ways.

“What’s happened is catastrophic,” he said. “But you can see God’s love coming in. It is so good to see God in action. Actions speak louder than words. And the love of Christ has shown through Samaritan’s Purse. They’re in it for the long haul.

“You see God’s beauty in all this instead of seeing all this destruction. Taking something that’s real bad and turning it into something good. Everything is getting better every day.”

Read it all and please take the time to watch the powerful video.

Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, Athens Mayor Haris Doukas, several ministers, MPs, and representatives of the political and military leadership attended the Divine Liturgy at the Church of Dionysios Areopagite and the Blessing of the Waters at the Athens Reservoir.

“The sunlit Greece celebrates Epiphany with grandeur, drawing strength and hope from its message,” Prime Minister Mitsotakis remarked after the ceremony.

Read it all.

(Tovima) Believers Celebrate the #Epiphany Around the World- Photos https://t.co/o2b2sVuNLG 'President of the Republic, Katerina Sakellaropoulou, attended the celebrations in Kilkis, where she participated in the Divine Liturgy at the Holy Metropolitan Church of the…

— Kendall Harmon (@KendallHarmon6) January 10, 2025

What had originally been scheduled as a fall Diocesan Men’s Hike was transformed, this past month, into a Hurricane Helene Assistance trip. Seventeen men from 11 different churches travelled to the Lutheridge Camp and Conference Center in Arden, NC, to help make it ready for them to reopen.

“We had a group that planned to go hiking,” says Les Sease, Diocesan Coordinator for Men’s Hikes, who organized the trip. “But the trails were closed so we pivoted. I’m so glad we did!”

The men travelled caravan-style on October 10, 2024 with cars, trucks and trailers full of water, gas, food and other supplies.

“While the roads were passable, Lutheridge was a mess,” says Sease. “Piles of debris lined the main road.”

Read it all.

#SouthCarolina Diocesan Men’s Group Pivots from Hiking to Relief Assistance https://t.co/YMfbQvLwFK '“It felt great to help Lutheridge out,” says [Les] Sease. “Our upcoming Men’s Conference, which will be held in February, will be there. This was a way for us to help them reopen… pic.twitter.com/3B0sK6BGEg

— Kendall Harmon (@KendallHarmon6) November 8, 2024

Hurricane Helene Relief Efforts Need Your Support
 

The Diocese continues to mobilize, providing relief to those affected by Hurricane Helene. We are working closely with ARDF to coordinate efforts. Are you willing to donate supplies or funds or volunteer in relief efforts?

Fill out the form on our website.

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The Latest Edition of the #Anglican Diocese of #SouthCarolina Enewsletter https://t.co/N7YwW0YFAb #parishministry #religion #faith pic.twitter.com/zAvfRfVnXM

— Kendall Harmon (@KendallHarmon6) October 22, 2024