The more than 300 lakes discovered in the last couple of decades beneath the mighty Antarctic ice sheet have been sealed from the outside world for probably several million years. Today, a team of US Antarctic researchers proudly announced they have accessed one of the last unexplored frontiers on Earth.

At 05.00 a.m. local time, the WISSARD (Whillans Ice Stream Subglacial Access Research Drilling) field team hit the shallow waters of Lake Whillans, a small subglacial lake beneath 800 metre-thick ice at the margin of the West Antarctica’s Ice Sheet.

The historic breakthrough has been long in the making. The WISSARD project has been planned for more than a decade and required three and a half years of intense preparation.

snip

It shouldn’t take very long to find out. The water and sediment samples are now being processed and analysed for any form of organic carbon they may host.

Shoggoth or some long sleeping Elder Things that had retreated under the water? Let’s just be prepared to welcome our new (old?) alien overlords.

The heads were shipped from Rome as cargo on a Lufthansa Airlines flight, arriving at O’Hare about one week before Christmas.

“They were properly preserved and tagged as human specimens,” said Tony Brucci, chief investigator for the medical examiner’s office.

Brucci said U.S. Customs officials at O’Hare initially held up the shipment, when they found the paperwork to be “a little confusing.” Then the containers were X-rayed, and that’s when officials discovered what was inside, Brucci said.

Brian Bell, a spokesman with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, said earlier Tuesday that the specimens appear to be legitimate medical samples.

“There’s no issue with the transportation of body parts for medical purposes,” Bell said. “There’s nothing against the law that says you cannot ship them, provided you have the right documentation.”

While Bell said he has never before fielded questions about a large package of human body parts, such shipments are not without precedent, he noted.

“Everybody here is ‘Oh my gosh, you got a box of heads’ and everybody thinks that it’s unheard of,” Bell said. “It is a potentially legitimate medical shipment. We’ve seen it at various ports in the nation.”

I know what you mean. Who hasn’t had problems arise when shipping decapitated heads?

The best song ever in a horror movie is Stella by Starlight in 1944′s The Uninvited. When artists as diverse as Itzhak Perlman, Ray Charles, Ella Fitzgerald, Charlie Parker, Frank Sinatra, Miles Davis and a host of others covered the song, I don’t think that’s even subject to debate. The next that comes to mind is the simple, haunting score by John Carpenter for Halloween. Goblin is used to great effect in Susperia. What else is your favorite horror movie music?

In a “eureka” moment worthy of Dr. Frankenstein, scientists have discovered that two 3,000-year-old Scottish “bog bodies” are actually made from the remains of six people.

According to new isotopic dating and DNA experiments, the mummies—a male and a female—were assembled from various body parts, although the purpose of the gruesome composites is likely lost to history.

The discovery of a 700-year-old skeleton in Bulgaria—seen at the country’s National Museum of History in June—offers evidence that the fear of vampires is far older than Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

The “vampire” was found entombed among church ruins in the Black Sea town of Sozopol (map) earlier in the month.

Even the BBC is participating in the coverup.