Russians breach lake Vostok

A team of Russian scientists have finally breached through more than 3km of Antarctic ice to reach lake Vostok, on February 5th, after 20 years of effort. Lake Vostok itself has been trapped underneath the ice sheet for 14 million years.
Now scientists are hoping to discover new life forms in the prehistoric waters, which have been cut off from the rest of the world for so long that evolution may have produced some surprising new specimens.
However, not everybody is convinced life can exist in the lake, since its extremely high concentration in oxygen would make it very difficult for any living thing to survive in it. But the very lack of existence of life in Vostok would in itself be an important discovery: it would make it far less likely that life might develop on other planets or satellites of the solar system, where conditions would similarly be challenging. Read full feature on Lake Vostok in Wired online here and news release from New Scientist there.