South Korea plans to go ahead with a delayed rocket launch on Thursday next week in its third bid in four years to put a satellite into orbit, officials said.

If all goes as scheduled, the 140-tonne rocket will lift off between 4:00-6:55pm (0700-0955 GMT) from the Naro Space Center on the south coast, the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology said.

A South Pacific island identified on Google Earth and world maps does not exist, according to Australian scientists who went searching for the mystery landmass during a geological expedition.

The sizeable phantom island in the Coral Sea is shown as Sandy Island on Google Earth and Google maps and is supposedly midway between Australia and the French-governed New Caledonia.

Scientists hoping to detect dark matter deep in a former South Dakota gold mine have taken the last major step before flipping the switch on their delicate experiment and say they may be ready to begin collecting data as early as February.

What's regarded as the world's most sensitive dark matter detector was lowered earlier this month into a 70,000-gallon (264,971 liter) water tank nearly a mile (1.6 kilometers) beneath the earth's surface, shrouding it in enough insulation to hopefully isolate dark matter from the cosmic radiation that makes it impossible to detect above ground.

Wormholes reproduced in ancient wood-printed illustrations have revealed the odyssey of European beetles, set against a backdrop of climate change and globalization.

In an unusual study released Wednesday, biologist Blair Hedges at Penn State University in Pennsylvania looked at art printed with carved blocks of wood, a technique that illustrated millions of books before mechanized printing.

A joint European-Russian plan for an unmanned mission to look for signs of life on Mars cleared a hurdle at a European Space Agency (ESA) budget meeting in Naples on Wednesday, delegates said.

But a scheme to send a European lander to the Moon made no headway given ESA's money crunch, and an early-stage proposal to join China in a space weather forecasting system was also nixed, they said.

A New Zealand volcano used as a backdrop to "The Lord of the Rings" films erupted on Wednesday, spewing a column of ash three kilometers (1.9 miles) above the North Island, scientists said.

Vulcanologists said Mount Tongariro rumbled to life at 1:25 pm (0025 GMT), in a five-minute burst that briefly closed roads, put aviation authorities on high alert and sent nearby hikers scrambling for safety.

The average New Jersey beach is 30 to 40 feet narrower after Superstorm Sandy, according to a survey that is sure to intensify a long-running debate on whether federal dollars should be used to replenish stretches of sand that only a fraction of U.S. taxpayers use.

Some of New Jersey's famous beaches lost half their sand when Sandy slammed ashore in late October.

Chimpanzees in a midlife crisis? It sounds like a setup for a joke.

But there it is, in the title of a report published Monday in a scientific journal: "Evidence for a midlife crisis in great apes."

The U.N. weather agency says concentrations of the main global warming pollutant in the world's air reached a record high in 2011.

The World Meteorological Organization says the planet averaged 390 parts per million of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, up 40 percent from before the Industrial Age when levels were about 275 parts per million.

South Korea is set to go ahead next week with a delayed rocket launch as it aims to join the elite club of nations capable of putting a satellite into orbit, an official said Tuesday.

The project has been plagued with problems, with failed attempts in 2009 and 2010, and a successful launch this time is considered crucial to South Korea's commercial space ambitions.