South Korea suspended its third attempt to send a satellite into orbit by at least three days Friday, after a helium leak was detected in the rocket just hours before scheduled launch time.

With only a five-day launch window that ends October 30, any further delay could result in a much lengthier postponement, officials at the Naro Space Center told reporters.

Higher-than-normal radiation levels found in fish caught off Japan's east coast more than a year after the Fukushima nuclear disaster could indicate the plant is still leaking, new research says.

Marine chemist Ken Buesseler of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution reviewed official Japanese data on caesium levels in fish, shellfish and seaweed collected near the crippled nuclear plant.

Much of the U.S. East Coast has a good chance of getting blasted by gale-force winds, flooding, heavy rain and maybe even snow early next week by an unusual hybrid of hurricane and winter storm, federal and private forecasters say.

Though still projecting several days ahead of Halloween week, the computer models are spooking meteorologists. Government scientists said Wednesday the storm has a 70 percent chance of smacking the Northeast and mid-Atlantic.

Astronomers said Wednesday they have produced an image capturing some 84 million stars at our universe's core in a massive survey of the Milky Way.

The team's achievement at the Paranal observatory in northern Chile has been billed as the largest survey to date of stars in our galaxy -- multi-gigapixel.

Scientists have created embryos with genes from one man and two women, using a provocative technique that could someday be used to prevent babies from inheriting certain rare incurable diseases.

The researchers at Oregon Health & Sciences University said they are not using the embryos to produce children, and it is not clear when or even if this technique will be put to use. But it has already stirred a debate over its risks and ethics in Britain, where scientists did similar work a few years ago.

South Korea hopes to launch a satellite into space on Friday in its third attempt to join an elite club that includes Asian powers China, Japan and India.

After two previous failures in 2009 and 2010, the 140-tonne Korea Space Launch Vehicle (KSLV-I) will, weather permitting, blast off from the Naro Space Center on the south coast.

It could be the muffled sound of singing in the shower or that sing-songy indecipherable voice from the Muppets' Swedish Chef.

Surprisingly, scientists said the audio they captured was a whale imitating people. In fact, the whale song sounded so eerily human that divers initially thought it was a human voice.

Scientists on Tuesday said the sentencing of six Italian seismologists for underestimating the risk of a 2009 earthquake was a blow to scientific freedom, and some likened it to the persecution of Galileo.

From research into new drugs to identifying rogue asteroids that could strike Earth or even weather forecasting, all branches of science that advise the public about risk are at threat, they said.

A Russian spacecraft surged into clear skies over the Central Asian steppe Tuesday, carrying a three-man crew on their way to the International Space Station.

The engines of the Soyuz TMA-06M sent a powerful roar across the tinder-dry countryside of southern Kazakhstan as scheduled in the afternoon to deliver NASA astronaut Kevin Ford and Russians Oleg Novitsky and Yevgeny Tarelkin to the orbiting laboratory.

Global environmental watchdog Greenpeace launched a new report Monday warning the European Union against authorizing herbicide-tolerant genetically engineered (HTGE) crops, saying they would lead to herbicide-resistant super-weeds.

"When herbicide-tolerant crops are relied on heavily, they trigger the spread and emergence of resistant weeds, which has now happened throughout the United States," said Oregon-based agricultural economist Charles Benbrook, who was commissioned by Greenpeace to study the issue.