World To End Before Labour Day

Although we don’t normally cover science news here at 4080, this story was just too good to pass up.  Apparently, some people are worried that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) - a 27 kilometre long tube being built under the French-Swiss border - will destroy the planet when it’s switched on in August.  The concern is that the machine, whose purpose is “to smash highly-energised protons together at super-fast speeds to produce miniature versions of the Big Bang,” will generate a black hole “that might swallow the planet.” 

Scientists, anxious to start playing with the largest, funnest experimental gadget ever conceived, were quick to allay their critics’ apocolyptic concerns.  “Nature has already generated on Earth as many collisions as about a million LHC experiments - and the planet still exists,” a safety review by the European Organization for Nuclear Research reassured its readers.  Obviously, these foolish physicists just want to start blowing stuff up.

Damn you science!