Scientists claimed Tuesday to have pinpointed the genes most responsible for schizophrenia in a breakthrough they say will allow better diagnosis and treatment of the debilitating mental illness.

In a study involving genetic information from thousands of schizophrenia patients as well as healthy controls, the researchers said they identified hundreds of genes that can show who is most at risk.

A mystery liver disease thought to be caused by introduced weeds is causing hairy-nosed wombats in southern Australia to go bald and die, researchers said Tuesday.

The illness, which causes the wombat to lose some or all of its fur and then starve to death, is tearing through South Australia's native southern hairy-nosed wombats, threatening entire populations.

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.