I’ve been following the Lake Vostok story off and on – last I heard the Russian crew had penetrated thru the last few meters, broke thru, pulled the rig up & let the trapped lake water pressure-rise up into the bore hole and freeze. (For the un-Vostoky: the lake is a huge body of water 13,000 feet under the surface of the East Antarctic ice sheet; it may have been effectively isolated from the outside world for up to 25 million years.) Next antarctic summer (ie, December), they’ll pull up ice core samples & test for signs of life. Of course, most of the stories on this link the lake’s relationship to our own solar system’s various moons with potential under-ice-crust oceans, kept in liquid form by gravitational stressing from their parent planets. There are a few far-future ideas for probes designed to go to places like Enceladus and Europa, melt thru the ice layer and motor around taking snaps of the local squidamadolphs. Any bets on what the Russians might actually find when they examine their Vostok samples? Just bacteria? Algae? Ice sylphs? Plankton? Plankton eaters with mouths full of baleen-analogs and big ol’ inscrutable brains? Eyes that glow like a black smoke lurker’s foot-wide orbs? Ted Nugent’s career? Maybe just miles and miles of lightless wet? We wonder….