This week Mercury shows its best face in homage to the Messenger spacecraft, which crashed into the planet early morning April 30.     The craft was launched in August 2004 and reached Mercury in March 2011, the first to orbit the innermost planet. Since then it has circled Mercury more than 4,100 times, compiling more data in the process than everything combined before that.     Thursday, April 30, scientists at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab cut life support...

As a child in west central Florida, I was lucky to have a father and grandmother who were into plants. Dad introduced me to the bottlebrush shrub that lived beside our neighbor’s constructed pond. The sharp scent of its leaves, its fuzzy, flouncy red flowers and the way its seedpods all clustered together like rock candy on a stick fascinated me.     When my grandmother gave me a spade sized just for my hands, I spent hours digging in the soil blackened and made fragrant...

At the Galesville Hot Sox reunion game on Saturday, April 25, you’ll see baseball at its best, as community sport and social.     That’s what Bay Weekly founders Sandra Martin and Bill Lambrecht saw on a summer’s day in 1993:     The Bay sun beat down on the Hot Sox field like hard foul balls. You see how bleachers got their name. A week without rain had baked the grass, and the day is humid and dusty. But no one on this Sunday afternoon seemed...

For 24 hours — from 6pm May 5 to 6pm May 6 — the Community Foundation of Anne Arundel County will host the Great Give 2015. The Great Give is an online fundraising event created to raise awareness and generate mission-critical funds for 180 local charitable causes.     Last year, the Great Give raised $675,467 in a day, allowing local nonprofits to continue to provide valuable services to our community.     “We participated in last year’s...