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.

A camera at a Chinese nature reserve has spied a wild panda eating meat.

Pandas spend most of their days eating bamboo.

Samoans go to bed Thursday and will wake up on Saturday in an historic time zone switch which the Pacific island state's prime minister says will take the country forward to a more prosperous future.

Samoa currently sits to the east of the International Date Line -- which runs through the middle of the Pacific -- meaning that it is 11 hours behind GMT and is one of the last places on Earth to see the dawn.

China plans to launch space labs and manned ships and prepare to build space stations over the next five years, according to a plan released Thursday that shows the country's space program is gathering momentum.

China has already said its eventual goals are to have a space station and put an astronaut on the moon. It has made methodical progress with its ambitious lunar and human spaceflight programs, but its latest five-year plan beginning next year signals an acceleration.

Large seizures of elephant tusks make this year the worst on record since ivory sales were banned in 1989, with recent estimates suggesting as many as 3,000 elephants were killed by poachers, experts said.

"2011 has truly been a horrible year for elephants," said Tom Milliken, elephant and rhino expert for the wildlife trade monitoring network TRAFFIC, on Thursday.