Bar Harbor
U.S. News & World Report named the Mount Desert Island town the country’s best small town to visit, directly ahead of out-West hotspots Telluride, Jackson Hole, and Lake Tahoe. Bar Harbor’s unusual mix of mountains and sea seems to have tipped the scales.
York
Beach walkers in southern Maine and New Hampshire developed mysterious black stains on the bottoms of their feet. The culprit? Pigment from millions of dead kelp flies that had washed ashore.
Nashville Plantation
UMaine researchers uncovered invasive European earthworms at multiple sites in Nashville Plantation and the St. John River valley. The worms can have a number of harmful impacts, from decreasing forest-floor biomass to increasing soil erosion.
Woodland
In the annual Zaner-Bloser National Handwriting Contest, which draws about 80,000 entrants, Woodland Consolidated School’s Allison St. Peter was adjudged to write the best cursive of any third grader in the country, and seventh grader Christian Vargas won for cursive by a special-needs student.
Portland
A new Maine Medical Center wing for cardiac and vascular health will be named the Malone Family Tower after Boothbay summer residents John and Leslie Malone gave $25 million toward construction. It’s the largest donation the hospital has ever received.
Freeport
Shortly after longtime News Center Maine anchor Lee Nelson left his broadcasting gig to become a model, he scored a shoot for the L.L.Bean summer catalog, in which he sports a piqué quarter-zip pullover in deep coral.