"Worms From Hell" 2 Miles Underground, Princeton University Study

On what he likes to call “underground safaris,” a geoscientist made a startling discovery: tiny worms living nearly two-and-a-half miles beneath the Earth’s surface. This particular “extremophile”—an organism found in habitats considered uninhabitable—is remarkable not only for the depth at which it was found but also for its biological complexity. These half-millimeter-long nematodes—roughly a quarter of the diameter of the head of a pin—can apparently tolerate very high temperatures, prompting the researchers to nickname them “worms from hell.”

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