Last March, I embarked on a mini-road trip around Tasmania, an island off the southeast corner of Australia. Tassie, what Aussies affectionately call their smallest state, is a nature-lover's dream, with enough history and culinary delights to satisfy urbanites. While its landscape has similarities to New Zealand's North Island, with lush, rocky, "Lord of the Rings" countryside, it is unequivocally Australian, with carnivorous marsupials, eucalyptus forests and a mellow, rustic spirit.

Tasmania is best explored by car, which can be daunting for independent travelers. Like other Commonwealth countries, motorists in Australia drive on the left, in cars where the driver sits on the right. Yet it is rather easy to "hire" a car in Australia. Foreign drivers licenses in English are honored, and insurance is incorporated into the affordable rental package.

Northern California scientists say they have found a possible explanation for the honey bee die-off: A parasitic fly that hijacks the bees' bodies and causes them to abandon hives.

The symptoms mirror colony collapse disorder, in which all the adult honey bees in a colony suddenly disappear. The disorder continues to decimate hives in the U.S. and overseas.

Fragments of a failed Russian space probe are now expected to fall to Earth on Jan. 15, officials said Wednesday.

The unmanned Phobos-Ground probe was launched Nov. 9 on what was supposed to have been a 2 1/2-year mission to the Mars moon of Phobus to take soil samples and fly them back to Earth, but it became stuck in Earth's orbit and attempts to send commands that could propel it toward the Mars moon were unsuccessful.

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.