After more than 20 years of drilling through two miles of glacial ice Russian scientists have reached the surface of Antarctica's largest sub-glacial lake. The lake hasn't been touched by light in millions of years and may be home to cold-loving organisms that have been left to their own evolutionary devices for millennia. Joining us now is Richard Black, science correspondent for our partner the BBC.

Near Geneva, Switzerland scientists from the European Center for Nuclear Research are scheduled to present preliminary evidence in their search to find the Higgs boson particle, commonly known as the "God particle." Proving its existence would validate the leading theory of particle physics.

Astronomers from the University of California, Berkeley announced that they had discovered the two most massive black holes to date. Their findings situate the black holes at between 10 and 21 billion times the mass of the sun. They are being published in journal Nature. Theoretical astrophysicist Chung-Pei Ma led the team that made these discoveries, and she joins The Takeaway to discuss what this all means.

NASA’s Kepler mission has confirmed the discovery of a planet in the habitable zone of a sun-like star. A NASA researcher says the Earth-like planet would have a surface temperature around 70 degrees Fahrenheit. This makes it a so-called "Goldilocks planet" — not too hot, not too cold, just right to support life. Researchers have also measured the largest black holes yet. A team of UC Berkeley scientists have confirmed the discovery of the two biggest black holes yet to be documented. Each black hole is 10 billion times larger than our sun.

30 years ago, the first cases of AIDS were reported in the United States. Since then, more than 25 million people worldwide have died from the disease, and more than 34 million people are currently infected with HIV. Being diagnosed with HIV used to be the equivalent of a death sentence. But over the past few years, anti-viral drugs have become less expensive and more effective in fighting the disease, allowing life to go on for millions.

Andres Breivik, the 32-year-old Norwegian man who killed 77 people and injured 151 others in July, was declared insane by state psychiatrists in Oslo on Tuesday. After planting a car bomb near government buildings in Oslo that killed eight people on July 22, Breivik drove to a political youth camp on Utoeya island and gunned down 69 people, many of whom were teens. In an online manifesto that was found later, Breivik claimed to be defending Europe from an Islamic invasion enabled by Norway's Labour Party and the European Union. Alexander Levi, a lawyer in Oslo, discusses the likelihood of Breivik facing a prison sentence after being declared insane.

On Saturday, NASA will be launching the new rover "Curiosity," also known as Mars Science Laboratory. The mission is meant to examine chemical ingredients to see if the planet can support human life. The spacecraft will explore a crater the size of a large lake. Curiosity is delivering a rover equipped to test if there is methane in the air. This could be a key sign that the "Red Planet" may be able to support life.

Charles Babbage, the 19th century British mathematician, philosopher, and engineer, has been called the "father of computing" for the powerful calculating machine he devised in the 1830s: the Babbage Analytical Engine. Babbage never built it, but now a team of British researchers at the Science Museum in London are combing through his blueprints to see if they can — and to see see if it works.  

Have you ever wondered why we see time move forward, but never backward? Are you uncertain about how time and space relate to each other? Do you wonder if there are other universes out there that are similar to our own? If so, you’re not alone. Physicist and bestselling author Brian Greene has been delving into these questions his whole life.

All month we’ve been talking about innovation — speaking to innovative people and discussing innovative ideas. Now we hear from  a woman who has designed a product for diabetics that not only solves a problem but is changing attitudes too. Jessica Floeh is the creator of Hanky Pancreas, a line of insulin pump accessories — scarves, neck pieces and other decorative items — that make the functional medical device fashionable.

Administering HPV vaccines for girls and young women has become a controversial topic, with some parents uncomfortable vaccinating children as young as 11 for a sexually transmitted disease. The vaccine has also become a hot topic among the GOP presidential candidates, with Rep. Michele Bachmann falsely claiming the vaccine caused a girl to become "mentally retarded." Doctors say there have been no proven cases of any harmful side-effects and that the vaccination is important in preventing several cancers, which HPV can lead to. The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is now recommending that boys and young men take the vaccine to prevent throat and anal cancer, as well as the spread of HPV to women.

The world’s population is set to reach seven billion on Monday, October 31, 2011. The Takeaway is talking about what this monumental number means for people, resources and the planet. One of the biggest questions is who exactly the seven billionth person will be and what his or her life will be like. Suzanne Petroni is vice president for global health at the Public Health Institute, and she has some surprising predictions on who this person might be.

Malaria kills about 780,000 people a year, and most of them are children in Africa. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has made eradication of the disease a top priority. On Tuesday, the organization touted the results of a study that showed a vaccine developed by GlaxoSmithKline protected nearly 50 percent children from severe malaria. As far a success rates for vaccines go, those are not the best odds, but even that amount of protection would save millions of lives over a even just a decade of use. And the news does indicate that scientists are on the right path toward eventually preventing malaria.

By most accounts, the history of AIDS begins sometime in the late 1970s, before the first official cases were diagnosed in 1981 among a handful of gay men. But a striking new book by Dr. Jacques Pépin, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Sherbrooke in Quebec, upends medical history. In "The Origins of AIDS," Pépin traces the roots of the disease back to 1921 when a handful of bush-meat hunters in Africa may have been the first to be exposed to infected chimpanzee blood.

This past week saw an outpouring of grief around the country for Apple founder Steve Jobs, who died of pancreatic cancer last Wednesday. Jobs is remembered as a visionary who changed how we use technology every day. That commercial announcing the launch of Apple's Macintosh played off of George Orwell's "1984" and presented Apple as an iconoclast. But in recent New York Times Op-Ed argues that today there's no company that looks more like the Big Brother of that commercial than Apple itself.

The Nobel Prize for physics was awarded on Tuesday to three scientists for their discovery that the universe in is being blown apart by a force known as "dark energy." Saul Perlmutter of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Brian P. Schmidt of the Australian National University, and Adam G. Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute at Johns Hopkins University will share the honor. Adam G. Riess discusses the honor and explains what dark energy is, and why it's important to the universe.

Scientists have found that babies can become fluent in foreign languages at an extremely fast rate; one that begins to slow down by their first birthday. What is it about the make-up of their brains as newborns that gives them this ability? Could adults train their brains to be more like the brains of babies?

A new study in Science Magazine is calling into question the logic behind single-sex schooling. The report, "The Pseudoscience of Single-Sex Schooling," says that single-sex education is "justified by weak, cherry-picked, or misconstrued scientific claims rather than by valid scientific evidence." This has stirred up controversy amongst same-sex education advocates.

Einstein's Law of Relativity is one of the few scientific equations most people know — and it's a pillar of modern physics and fundamental to the way that the universe works. The equation states that nothing is faster than the speed of light, but one of the world's foremost laboratories says they've found subatomic particles called neutrinos that travel even faster. If their findings are proven true, it may alter our understanding of the universe.

For almost a decade, scientists have been trying to determine the structure of an AIDS-like virus found in rhesus monkeys. If they could determine the structure of the virus, they speculated they could design a drug to stop it. But the problem proved very difficult, even for the most advanced supercomputers. Then came Fold.it, an online game that harnesses the power of crowd sourcing and human putzing to solve the mysteries of protein structure. Researchers turned the problem over to the gamers — and they solved it in just ten days.