After more than two decades of drilling in Antarctica, Russian scientists have confirmed that they reached the surface of a gigantic freshwater lake hidden under miles of ice for some 20 million years. The scientists returned 40 litres of water to the surface - water isolated from earthly life forms since before Man existed.  The scientists will later remove the frozen sample for analysis in December when the next Antarctic summer comes. They have now left the site. The scientists rebuffed claims that their drilling could have contaminated the lake, a body of water which has been in isolation for 20 million years.

The Battle of the Ice, was a battle between the Republic of Novgorod and the Estonian branch of the Teutonic Knights on April 5 of 1242, at Lake Peipus. The battle is notable for having been fought largely on the frozen lake. The battle was a significant defeat sustained by Roman Catholic crusaders during the Northern Crusades, which were directed against pagans and Eastern Orthodox Christians rather than Muslims in the Holy Land. The crusaders’ defeat in the battle marked the end of their campaigns against the Orthodox Novgorod Republic and other Russian territories for the next century.

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog is an English-language pangram, that is, a phrase that contains all of the letters of the english alphabet. It has been used to test typewriters and computer keyboards, and in other applications involving all of the letters in the English alphabet. Owing to its shortness and coherence, it has become widely known.

The Death Touch techniques appear in a number of kung fu films. In Bloodsport, Jean-Claude Van Damme’s character proves that he was trained by Master Tanaka by demonstrating the Dim Mak attack to the judges. Though the demonstration was conducted on a stack of bricks instead of a human opponent, the film does refer to the move as a Dim Mak and Death Touch. 

We Are the Champions is a power ballad written by Freddie Mercury, recorded and performed by British rock band Queen for their 1977 album News of the World. One of their most famous and popular songs, it remains among rock’s most recognisable anthems. The song was a worldwide success, reaching number two in the UK Singles Chart, and number four on the Billboard Hot 100 in the United States. In 2009, “We Are the Champions” was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, and was voted the world’s favourite song in a 2005 Sony Ericsson world music poll. In 2011, a team of scientific researchers concluded that the song was the catchiest song in the history of pop music. We Are the Champions has become an anthem for sporting victories, including as official theme song for 1994 FIFA World Cup, and has been often used or referenced in popular culture. The song has been covered by many artists.

Nome, Alaska appeared on the map during one of the world’s great gold rushes at the end of the century. Located on the Seward Peninsula, by 1900 the town’s population had swelled to 20, 000 after gold was discovered on beaches along the Bearing Sea. By 1925, however, much of the gold was gone, and scarcely 1, 400 people were left in the remote nothern outpost. Nome was icebound seven months of the year and the nearest railroad was more than 650 miles away, in the town of Nenana.

Nome was able to communicate with the rest of the world via the radio telegraph, a relatively new invention in those days. And, although Alaska was still a U.S. Territory until 1959, the government maintained a route over which relays of dog teams carried mail from Anchorage to Nome. A one-way trip along this route, called the Iditerod Trail, took about a month and the “mushers” that traversed the trail were the best in Alaska.

Carpe diem is a phrase from a Latin poem by Horace that has become an aphorism. It is popularly translated as Seize the day. Carpe literally means “to pick, pluck, pluck off, cull, crop, gather”, but Ovid used the word in the sense of, “To enjoy, seize, use, make use of”. In Horace, the phrase is part of the longer Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero – Seize the Day, putting as little trust as possible in the future, and the ode says that the future is unforeseen, and that instead one should scale back one’s hopes to a brief future, and drink one’s wine. This phrase is usually understood against Horace’s Epicurean background.

In natural science, abiogenesis or biopoesis is the study of how biological life arises from inorganic matter through natural processes, and the method by which life on Earth arose. Most amino acids, often called “the building blocks of life”, can form via natural chemical reactions unrelated to life, as demonstrated in the Miller–Urey experiment and similar experiments that involved simulating some of the hypothetical conditions of the early Earth in a laboratory. In all living things, these amino acids are organized into proteins, and the construction of these proteins is mediated by nucleic acids, that are themselves synthesized through biochemical pathways catalysed by proteins. Which of these organic molecules first arose and how they formed the first life is the focus of abiogenesis.

Fossils are the traces of ancient animals and plants found buried in rock. In order for an organism to be fossilized, the remains need to be covered by sediment, frozen, desiccated, or come to rest in an oxygen free environment. Sometimes a fossil retains the shape and structure of the hard parts of an animal, such as fossilized dinosaur bones. These are not the original bones, because minerals have replaced them over millions of years, but they have the same shape. Other fossils are just the impression of an animal or plant, created when the plant or animal was buried in mud that has gradually solidified into rock.even footprints of animals such as dinosaurs have been preserved.

The Battle of Thermopylae was fought between an alliance of Greek city-states, led by King Leonidas of Sparta, and the Persian Empire of Xerxes I over the course of three days, during the second Persian invasion of Greece. It took place simultaneously with the naval battle at Artemisium, in August or September 480 BC, at the pass of Thermopylae. The Persian invasion was a delayed response to the defeat of the first Persian invasion of Greece, which had been ended by the Athenian victory at the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC. Xerxes had amassed a huge army and navy, and set out to conquer all of Greece. The Athenian general Themistocles had proposed that the allied Greeks block the advance of the Persian army at the pass of Thermopylae, and simultaneously block the Persian navy at the Straits of Artemisium. The movies The 300 Spartans and 300 were based on the events during and close to the time of the battle. 

In 1929, a group of historians found an amazing map drawn on a gazelle skin. Research showed that it was a genuine document drawn in 1513 by Piri Reis, a famous admiral of the Turkish fleet in the sixteenth century. The Piri Reis map shows the western coast of Africa, the eastern coast of South America, and the northern coast of Antarctica. The northern coastline of Antarctica is perfectly detailed. The most puzzling however is not so much how Piri Reis managed to draw such an accurate map of the Antarctic region 300 years before it was discovered, but that the map shows the coastline under the ice. Geological evidence confirms that the latest date Queen Maud Land could have been charted in an ice-free state is 4000 BC. 

The late heavy bombardment is a period of time approximately 4.1 to 3.8 billion years ago (Ga) during which a large number of impact craters are believed to have formed on the Moon, and by inference on Earth, Mercury, Venus, and Mars as well. The evidence for this event comes primarily from the dating of lunar samples, which indicates that most impact melt rocks formed in this rather narrow interval of time. While many hypotheses have been put forth to explain a “spike” in the flux of either asteroidal or cometary materials to the inner solar system, no consensus yet exists as to its cause. The Nice model popular among planetary scientists postulates that the gas giant planets migrated in orbit at this time, causing objects in the asteroid belt and/or Kuiper belt to be put onto eccentric orbits that reached the terrestrial planets. Nevertheless, some argue that the lunar sample data do not require a cataclysmic cratering event near 3.9 Ga, and that the apparent clustering of impact melt ages near this time is an artifact of sampling material affected by a single large impact basin.