Results tagged “endoftheworld” from 60 Second Science

So I'm a technological optimist. By and large, I think that, ultimately, technology will solve all my problems. That is, of course, if it doesn't destroy the world first. Because, let's face it, science is kind of scary.

At the top of my list of things that frighten me (followed shortly by a super-flu that turns people into zombies) is the sort-of-fact that the Large Hadron Collider could spew out strangelets and turn the Earth into a black hole, summon aggressive time travelers from the future, or plop us into a mediocre sci-fi movie.

Thank the good lord Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho have their heads screwed on right. They've filed suit in a federal court in Honolulu to stop CERN from powering up the LHC until it's produced safety and environmental reports.

[Google News]

Continue reading 'Hawaiians sue to stop Large Hadron Collider / save the world' >

Don't look now, but we might be surrounded by invisible black holes, wandering around just waiting to devour up stars and planets, argued Kelly Holley-Bockelmann of Vanderbilt University today at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

Holley-Bockelmann and others at the University of Michigan and Penn State University say these "intermediate mass" black holes are nearly always invisible--not to mention possibly, and controversially, non-existent--but the researchers have been running computer simulations to predict where they might wind up. Answer: Our backyard.

Continue reading 'Milky Way possibly chock full of rogue black holes, creamy nougat' >