If it isn't polar bears in the North Pole, it's penguins in the South. Hundreds of dead baby penguins have washed up on the beaches of Rio de Janeiro over the past two months. Story in the full article.

Human beings have a bad habit of making the place they inhabit quite uninhabitable. (I like the word "habit" for some reason.) The sad thing is, human beings as a race would probably be the last to suffer its own mistakes - it's the rest of the world that would suffer first, and it looks like the polar bears of the Arctic are the next casualties. In this edition of the Science Weekend Warrior, we take a look at what it's like to be on top of the food chain.

So the North Pole is melting and polar bears are on the verge of extinction. Solution? Ship 'em off to the other pole, to Antarctica. Lame. Story in the full article.

There used to be water on Mars, we know as much. Just last week, NASA's Phoenix Spacecraft discovered of ice underground. This week, a group of UC Berkeley researchers posited that Mars' atmosphere can be likened to deserts we have here on Earth, and that it even rained in the red planet. How was this possible? Learn more after the jump.

If a 160-square-mile ice shelf collapsing isn't a sure sign of global warming, then we sure as heck don't know anymore what is. Last month, a huge chunk of the Wilkins ice shelf in Antarctica broke away from its main body, and the remaining bulk of it is about to give way any time soon. Scientists are not as disturbed, though. Read on to the full article to know why.

Australia's Aurora Australis, a marine science research vessel, recent came back from its trip from Antarctica. Dr. Martin Riddle, leader of the voyage, said that their expedition was able to uncover the rich and complex marine life in the previously unknown environment. Find out what they discovered in the full article.

Underwater volcanic eruptions are fairly common, but under-ice eruptions? Not so much. Scientists have discovered evidence of a volcano erupting under the Antarctic ice sheet 2000 years ago. Details in the full article.

The Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary is a vast stretch of ocean near Antarctica, 50 million square kilometers in size and ordained as a whaling-free zone by the International Whaling Commission. Unfortunately, the strict zero-whaling rule isn't honored apparently as the Greenpeace ship called the Esperanza spotted a Japanese whaling fleet within the sanctuary. What followed was a game of cat and mouse, and Greenpeace took the field...for now.

Data gleaned from satellite Metop revealed that the ozone hole over Antarctica was twice as big as Europe at its worst. This observation was made in late September. Scientists who analyzed data from the Global Ozone Monitoring Experiment 2 (GOME-2) on board Metop said that some unusual meteorological conditions this year caused the extensive thinning of the ozone layer.

Europe's Metop is one of three identical weather and climate observer spacecrafts that will be flying in a polar orbit over the next few years to gather data. This is a joint project between Eumetsat and the ESA">European Space Agency (ESA).

Metop's newest observation - though significant and alarming - pales in comparison to last year's recorded size of the Arctic ozone hole. Last year's hole was said to have been twice the size of North America. Even with the Montreal Protocol which places an international ban on substances responsible for ozone depletion, scientists still find ozone thinning over different regions such as the South Atlantic, South America, and Australia. Because of these recent findings, almost 200 governments have agreed to speed up the timetable on phasing out chemicals that have negative effects on the ozone layer.

Scientists and researchers believe that when the next Ice Age occurs, sadly due to global warming currently plaguing our Earth, ancient bacteria and viruses will come back to life.

This belief was strengthen further when an eight-million-year-old bacterium, extracted from the oldest known ice on Earth, started growing in a laboratory. The said bacterium was dug by a team of researchers from Rutgers University in New Jersey.

It came from the ice found between three and five metres beneath the surface of a glacier in the Beacon and Mullins valleys of Antarctica. Aside from the eight-billion-year-old sample, four more samples were taken ranging between 100,000 and eight million years old.

"We tried to grow them in media, and the young stuff grew really fast. We could plate them and isolate colonies", commented team member Kate Bidle. Quite intriguingly, the oldest sample only contains one type of bacterium compared to the younger ones which are home to various micro-organisms. The oldest sample, furthermore, grows much slowly - only doubling in size every 70 days.

Scientist Russell Vreeland of the Ancient Biomaterials Institute at West Chester University in Pennsylvania gave this interesting comment, "This has been happening probably for a long, long time. Ice freezes and melts, rocks sink and are eroded. Microbes have been involved with this process for almost four billion years".