Lake buried under 800 meters of ice hosts cells, researchers find. (p. 12)

At 5 a.m. local time today (January 28), U.S. researchers successfully completed boring a 30-centimeter-diameter hole through 800 meters of Antarctic ice, piercing into Lake Whillans. It’s one of a series of interconnected subglacial lakes that periodically fill and drain. Scientists estimate that the lake’s water, which flows beneath the Whillans Ice Stream, has not had contact with the atmosphere for untold millennia.Research teams from Russia, the United Kingdom and United States have each spearheaded drilling efforts over the past few years to pierce and sample separate subglacial Anta...

Any day now, a team of 40 scientists and support personnel expects to begin using a warm, high pressure jet of water to bore a 30 centimeter hole through 83 meters of ice. Once it breaks through to the sea below, they’ll have a few days to quickly sample life from water before the hole begins freezing up again. It's just a test. But if all goes well, in a few weeks the team will move 700 miles and bore an even deeper hole to sample for freshwater life that may have been living for eons outside even indirect contact with Earth’s atmosphere.

Some recent weird weather tied to warming. (p. 20)

Many people of a certain age (like my folks) enjoy flying south to warmer climes when winter weather threatens. I’m also flying south this December — but not to warm up. As a guest of the National Science Foundation, I’ll be checking out summer in the really deep South: Antarctica. Temps expected at certain sites I’m scheduled to visit, such as the South Pole, threaten to surpass the worst that my hometown will encounter in the dead of winter.

Rare immune complication previously seen only in people devastates animals that had appeared to evade white nose syndrome.

Effects vary but dire impacts seen with some very low exposures.

Texas spent 2011 baking. About half the state was gripped by what climate scientists described as an “exceptional” drought, one that goes beyond their categories of severe, or even extreme. Texans are used to dry, but this was worse than the Dust Bowl and drier than the crippling decade-long drought of the 1950s. In fact, it was the driest year since record-keeping began in 1895. As rivers dried up and farmers scrambled to irrigate, many public water systems reported that they were within six months of running out of water. Agricultural extension agents pegged crop and livestock losses at... (p. 22)

There are standards — rules, essentially — for how much outdoor air should be cycled through buildings to keep people inside healthy. That circulating air is known as ventilation. And when there isn’t enough new air coming in to push the stale air out, pollutants can build up. One of those pollutants, carbon dioxide, or CO2, increases with every breath we exhale. Indoor-air scientists have always used this CO2 as a harmless yardstick for measuring the staleness of indoor air. A new study now suggests that yardstick might not be so harmless after all.Visit the new Science News for Ki...