Tens of thousands of dead herring have carpeted a stretch of coast in northern Norway — and then disappeared again.

The fish appeared on New Year's Eve, leading to speculation that predators might have driven a huge school ashore or the fish could have been washed onto the beach by a powerful storm that hit Norway on Christmas Day.

U.S. scientists said Tuesday that their study of a set of medieval bones found in Albania has revealed traces of a modern infectious disease that afflicts people who eat unpasteurized dairy products.

The findings, published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, are the first to suggest that the disease, known as brucellosis, has been in Albania since at least the middle Ages.

Australian scientists hailed what they described as a world-first discovery of two shark species interbreeding Tuesday, a never-before-seen phenomenon which could help them cope with warmer oceans.

Lead researcher Jess Morgan said the mating of the local Australian black-tip shark with its global counterpart, the common black-tip, was an unprecedented discovery with implications for the entire shark world.

So how did the chicken cross the road? Or the raccoon, Virginia opossum, woodchuck, red fox, white-tailed deer or great blue heron?

To find out, researchers in Maryland put motion-detection cameras in culverts throughout the mid-Atlantic U.S. state to learn more about how wildlife of all kinds use culverts, or storm drains, to avoid motor traffic.

The cruise to the moon took 3 1/2 months and covered 2 1/2 million miles (4 million kilometers) — far longer than the direct three-day flight by Apollo astronauts.

Over the New Year's weekend, a pair of NASA spacecraft arrived back-to-back at their destination in the first mission devoted to studying lunar gravity.

A brainless, primeval organism able to navigate a maze might help Japanese scientists devise the ideal transport network design. Not bad for a mono-cellular being that lives on rotting leaves.

Amoeboid yellow slime mold has been on Earth for thousands of years, living a distinctly un-high-tech life, but, say scientists, it could provide the key to designing bio-computers capable of solving complex problems.

Dozens of camera traps installed in an Indonesian national park earlier this year captured images of 35 critically endangered Javan rhinos, including five calves, officials said Thursday.

It's still possible that more of the animals live in the Ujung Kulon National Park — the animal's original habitat — said Bambang Novianto, director of biodiversity conservation at the forestry ministry.

NASA is counting down the seconds until its twin spacecraft bound for the moon make back-to-back arrivals over the New Year's weekend.

The washing machine-sized probes have been cruising independently toward their destination since launching in September aboard the same rocket on a mission to measure lunar gravity.

Scientists struggling to protect fish native to the U.S. Great Lakes from a greedy predator called the round goby are taking a page from the playbook of stores that pipe classical music through loudspeakers to chase away loitering teens.

Gobies hang around prime spawning areas and gobble up eggs laid by trout, whitefish and other species important to the region's commercial and sport fishing industries. Biologists plan to strike back by firing loud underwater cannons near some of the gobies' favorite haunts, hoping to drive them off long enough for the eggs to survive.

A new island has appeared off the west coast of Yemen following a volcanic eruption, NASA said Friday.

The U.S. space agency's Earth Observatory posted satellite photos showing a plume of white smoke rising from the ocean near the Zubair group of islands in the Red Sea on December 23.