The dark suit and tie that Joe Gutheinz wore set him apart from other customers inside a Texas eatery where the usual attire is jeans and cowboy hats.

An appetite for down-home cooking wasn't what brought the former NASA investigator to the Pitt Grill recently. He was on a quest to identify and maybe recover some of the rarest treasure brought to Earth and then lost: moon rocks.

Spanish tenor Placido Domingo and British conductor Sir Simon Rattle on Sunday were among the winners of Israel's prestigious Wolf Prize for artists and scientists.

Domingo and Rattle shared the arts award, Americans Paul Alivisatos and Charles Lieber won for chemistry, Ronald M. Evans of the United States for medicine, Israel's Jacob Bekestein for physics, and American Michael Ascbaden and Luis Caffarelli, a joint U.S.-Argentine national, took the mathematics prize.

Expo 2012 has opened in South Korea's coastal city of Yeosu for a three-month run.

Organizers say the fair, which kicked off Saturday, has the largest number of robots in the history of expos. Attractions include a robot fish that explores underwater resources in an environment-friendly way.

The giant asteroid Vesta got clobbered not once but twice, and it has the scars to prove it.

Ever since the Hubble Space Telescope spied a huge depression in the asteroid's south pole, scientists surmised it was carved by a collision with a celestial object, most likely a smaller asteroid.

The U.S. Navy may hurt more dolphins and whales by using sonar and explosives in Hawaii and California under a more thorough analysis that reflects new research and covers naval activities in a wider area than previous studies.

The Navy estimates its use of explosives and sonar may unintentionally cause more than 1,600 instances of hearing loss or other injury to marine mammals each year, according to a draft environmental impact statement that covers training and testing planned from 2014 to 2019. The Navy calculates the explosives could potentially kill more than 200 marine mammals a year.

Parts of Japan's Mount Fuji, a national symbol and key tourist attraction, could collapse if a newly-discovered fault line under the mountain shifts, a government-commissioned report has warned.

A three-year study by seismologists discovered a previously unknown active fault underneath the mountain, which sits around 100 kilometers (60 miles) west of Tokyo.

U.S. and Italian scientists have traced a bacterium that has been destroying kiwifruit in New Zealand and Europe back to China where they believe it originated, according to a study on Wednesday.

Since the disease known as "kiwifruit canker" emerged in Italy 2008, it has wiped out orchards mainly across Europe and South America and caused hundreds of millions of dollars in losses, according to the article in the journal PLoS ONE.

Birds with multiple versions of their color patterns evolved into new species more quickly than those with uniform plumage, Australian researchers revealed in a significant genetic study published Thursday.

The University of Melbourne research, published in "Nature", found that birds with more than one version of its markings such as the Gouldian finch, which can have a red, black or yellow head, "rapidly" evolved into new species.

Peru's northern beaches have been declared off-limits as scientists scramble to pin down what is causing the mysterious deaths of thousands of birds and dolphins.

Since March some 4,000 birds, mostly pelicans and boobies, have been found dead along a 200-kilometer (120 mile) stretch of northern coastline reaching up to the border with Ecuador along with at least 900 dolphins.

A Singapore-born teenager who recently moved to Canada won a national science award Tuesday for her groundbreaking work on the anti-aging properties of tree pulp, officials said.

Janelle Tam, 16, won the $5,000 award in the 2012 Sanofi BioGENEius Challenge Canada for showing that cellulose, the woody material found in trees that enables them to stand, also acts as a potent anti-oxidant.