>Try this headline: Black Hole Eats Earth

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More strife in Iraq. U.S. financial system in crisis. Rice prices soar. None of these headlines will matter a bit, though, if two men pursuing a lawsuit in a court in Hawaii turn out to be right. They think a giant particle accelerator that will begin smashing protons together outside Geneva this summer might produce a black hole that will spell the end of the Earth – and maybe the universe.

Scientists say that is very unlikely – though they have done some checking just to make sure.

The world’s physicists have spent 14 years and $8 billion building the Large Hadron Collider, in which the colliding protons will recreate energies and conditions last seen a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Researchers will sift the debris from these primordial recreations for clues to the nature of mass and new forces and symmetries of nature.

But Walter Wagner and Luis Sancho contend that scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, have played down the chances that the collider could produce, among other horrors, a tiny black hole, which, they say, could eat the Earth. Or it could spit out something called a “strangelet” that would convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of something called “strange matter.” Their suit also says CERN has failed to provide an environmental impact statement as required under the U.S. National Environmental Policy Act.

Although it sounds bizarre, the case touches on a serious issue that has bothered scholars and scientists in recent years – namely how to estimate the risk of new groundbreaking experiments and who gets to decide whether or not to go ahead.

The lawsuit, filed March 21 in U.S. District Court in Honolulu, seeks a temporary restraining order prohibiting CERN from proceeding with the accelerator until it has produced a safety report and an environmental assessment. It names the U.S. Department of Energy, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the National Science Foundation and CERN as defendants.

According to a spokesman for the Justice Department, which is representing the Department of Energy, a scheduling meeting has been set for June 16.

Why should CERN, an organization of European nations based in Switzerland, even show up in a Hawaiian courtroom?

In an interview, Wagner said, “I don’t know if they’re going to show up.” CERN would have to voluntarily submit to the court’s jurisdiction, he said, adding that he and Sancho could have sued in France or Switzerland, but to save expenses they had added CERN to the docket here. He claimed that a restraining order on Fermilab and the Energy Department, which helps to supply and maintain the accelerator’s massive superconducting magnets, would shut down the project anyway.

James Gillies, head of communications at CERN, said the laboratory as of yet had no comment on the suit. “It’s hard to see how a district court in Hawaii has jurisdiction over an intergovernmental organization in Europe,” Gillies said.

“There is nothing new to suggest that the LHC is unsafe,” he said, adding that its safety had been confirmed by two reports, with a third on the way, and would be the subject of a discussion during an open house at the lab on April 6.

“Scientifically, we’re not hiding away,” he said.

But Wagner is not mollified. “They’ve got a lot of propaganda saying it’s safe,” he said in an interview, “but basically it’s propaganda.”

In an e-mail message, Wagner called the CERN safety review “fundamentally flawed” and said it had been initiated too late. The review process violates the European Commission’s standards for adhering to the “Precautionary Principle,” he wrote, “and has not been done by ‘arms length’ scientists.”

Physicists in and out of CERN say a variety of studies, including an official CERN report in 2003, have concluded there is no problem. But just to be sure, last year the anonymous Safety Assessment Group was set up to do the review again.

“The possibility that a black hole eats up the Earth is too serious a threat to leave it as a matter of argument among crackpots,” said Michelangelo Mangano, a CERN theorist who said he was part of the group. The others prefer to remain anonymous, Mangano said, for various reasons. Their report was due in January.

This is not the first time around for Wagner. He filed similar suits in 1999 and 2000 to prevent the Brookhaven National Laboratory from operating the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. That suit was dismissed in 2001. The collider, which smashes together gold ions in the hopes of creating what is called a “quark-gluon plasma,” has been operating without incident since 2000.

Wagner, who lives on the Big Island of Hawaii, studied physics and did cosmic ray research at the University of California, Berkeley, and received a doctorate in law from what is now known as the University of Northern California in Sacramento. He subsequently worked as a radiation safety officer for the Veterans Administration.

Sancho, who describes himself as an author and researcher on time theory, lives in Spain, probably in Barcelona, Wagner said. …Lisa Randall, a Harvard physicist whose work helped fuel the speculation about black holes at the collider, pointed out in a paper last year that black holes would not be produced at the collider after all, although other effects of so-called quantum gravity might appear.

As part of the safety assessment report, Mangano and Steve Giddings of the University of California, Santa Barbara, have been working intensely for the last few months on a paper exploring the possibilities of black holes. They think there are no problems but are reluctant to talk about their findings until they have been reviewed, Mangano said. – iht

Don’t worry, it won’t hurt a bit… if it is big enough. If it is a small black hole which slowly eats the Earth it will eat through the crust and people will die of earthquakes and molten hot magma as the Earth is devoured from the inside. Someone will do this sooner than you think. The Mayan’s knew about it too, but not in this much detail.

The fate of all life on the planet hangs on independent thinkers who are willing to challenge propaganda.

>Giant preserved squid on display

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A specially preserved giant squid has gone on display in Paris.

The squid, 6.5m (21.5ft) long, has undergone plastination, which means its liquids have been replaced by a polymer.

The process, which took two-and-a-half years and cost 65,000 euros ($100,000; £50,000), is designed to make the preserved squid look as natural as possible.

The creature is a gift from New Zealand, where it was fished out of the deep seas in 2000.

Sea monster

The squid hangs from the ceiling of France’s National Museum of Natural History, where its long pink tentacles stretch down towards a terrified-looking shark.

The giant creature has been named Wheke, after the sea monster of Maori mythology that led the Polynesians across the ocean to discover Aotearoa, or New Zealand.

It was 9m long when it was caught, but it shrank to 6.5m after it died.

The biologist who helped organise the donation said there should be a giant squid in the country of Jules Verne – the Frenchman who wrote the celebrated novel 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea. That was an epic tale of struggles between sailors and tentacled monsters, featuring a giant squid that tried to engulf a submarine.

Fluids replaced

The plastination process involves replacing the water, fat and other liquids in the body with a polymer that hardens. A pink pigment was added to make it look as close as possible to the living creature. It was first used by the German anatomist Gunther von Hagens, who has controversially preserved and exhibited human cadavers. The usual way of preserving life forms – by pickling them in a jar – would, the museum said, have been demeaning, and out of the question. –bbc

I had no idea that real giant squids look so fake.

>’George Bush is like crusty potato’

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James Wannerton, president of the UK Synaesthesia Association, explains how the condition which “mixes the senses” affects his life.

He is speaking at a conference in Edinburgh where scientists and others with the condition are discussing the phenomenon.

For as long as I can remember, words, word sounds, musical instruments and certain ambient noises have produced involuntary bursts of taste on my tongue.Texture and temperature also feature in this experience which is with me 24 hours a day. My dreams also contain tastes, and I am unable to turn it off.

Although predominant during my formative years, I never considered these invasive sensations to be abnormal. Tasting words seemed as natural as breathing.

As I got older and more involved in the wider world, I found my word/taste associations having an increasing effect in my everyday life, subtly dictating the nature and course of my friendships, personal relationships, my education, my career, where I live, what I wear, what I read, the make and colour of car that I drive. The list is endless.

As a teenager, my developing interest in girls was heavily influenced by the tastes of their names, something which has led me up some disastrous paths over the years.

A girl’s name was just as important as her looks and in some extreme cases, even her personality.

How shallow is that? I’ve constantly asked myself why girls with the sweetest tasting names quite often come with the sourest of temperaments.

‘Surreal experience’

Everyday tasks such as meeting people, general conversation, driving, shopping, or reading a newspaper, often pose an extra challenge.

I have concentration issues if a person I am listening to speaks slowly and has clear diction. At university, some lectures were a total waste of time.

I vividly remember once sitting through a two-hour economics lecture, having learnt very little about the Money Supply but having an intense craving for apples.

Negotiating the taste of road sign information at the same time as processing the multifarious flavours of my surroundings often causes confusion and usually ends with me feeling hot and bothered in Burnley when I should have been in a cake shop in Eccles. Eating out can be a surreal experience, especially if the menus are in a language other than English.

Thankfully, there is a plus side to all of this.

Music has a very pleasant added dimension and my taste sensations most certainly aid my memory recall. If I see a face I can’t immediately identify my mind goes through a process of using taste recollections to effectively apply a name to the face. Whenever I see a picture of Tony Blair I instantly get the taste of desiccated coconut.

… George Bush gives me a taste similar to the crusty potato bit on top of a cottage pie.What is beyond doubt is that I would never consider the option of being cured, if ever such a thing were offered, although it would interest me to find out how my perceptions would be altered if I “lost” it for a day. It is a fundamental part of who I am and has most certainly helped shape my concepts and personality. – bbc

What do the words “black hole” taste like?

>Decoded: ‘The clay tablet that tells how an asteroid destroyed Sodom 5,000 years ago’

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A clay tablet that has baffled scientists for more than a century has been identified as a witness’s account of an asteroid that destroyed the Biblical cities of Sodom and Gomorrah 5,000 years ago.

Researchers believe that the tablet’s symbols give a detailed account of how a mile-long asteroid hit the region, causing thousands of deaths and devastating more than one million sq km (386,000 sq miles).

The impact, equivalent to more than 1,000tons of TNT exploding, would have created one of the world’s biggest-ever landslides.

The Old Testament story describes how God destroyed the ‘wicked sinners’ of Sodom with fire and brimstone but allowed Lot, the city’s one good man, to flee with his family. The theory is the work of two rocket scientists – Alan Bond and Mark Hempsell – who have spent the past eight years piecing together the archaeological puzzle.

At its heart is a clay tablet called the Planisphere, discovered by the Victorian archaeologist Henry Layard in the remains of the library of the Royal Palace at Nineveh.

Using computers to recreate the night sky thousands of years ago, they have pinpointed the sighting described on the tablet – a 700BC copy of notes of the night sky as seen by a Sumerian astrologer in one of the world’s earliest-known civilisations – to shortly before dawn on June 29 in the year 3123BC. Half the tablet records planet positions and clouds, while the other half describes the movement of an object looking like a ‘stone bowl’ travelling quickly across the sky.

The description matches a type of asteroid known as an Aten type, which orbits the Sun close to the Earth. Its trajectory would have put it on a collision course with the Otz Valley.

‘It came in at a very low angle – around six degrees – and then clipped a mountain called Gaskogel around 11km from Köfels,’ said Mr Hempsell. ‘This caused it to explode – and as it travelled down the valley it became a fireball.

‘When it hit Köfels it created enormous pressures which pulverised the rock and caused the landslide. But because it wasn’t solid, there was no crater.’ The explosion would have created a mushroom cloud, while a plume of smoke would have been seen for hundreds of miles. Mr Hempsell said another part of the tablet, which is 18cm across and shaped like a bowl, describes a plume of smoke around dawn the following morning.

‘You need to know the context before you can translate it,’ said Mr Hempsell, of Bristol University. Geologists have dated the landslide to around 9,000 years ago, far earlier than the Sumerian record. However, Mr Hempsell, who has published a book on the theory, believes contaminated samples from the asteroid may have confused previous dating attempts.

Academics were also quick to disagree with the findings, which were published in A Sumerian Observation of the Köfels’s Impact Event. John Taylor, a retired expert in Near Eastern archaeology at the British Museum, said there was no evidence that the ancient Sumerians were able to make such accurate astronomical records, while our knowledge of Sumerian language was incomplete.

‘I remain unconvinced by these results,’ he added. –dailymail

The stone is a notebook of a long gone scientist. Scientists have to deal with not being believed sometimes, even when we describe verifiable facts in great detail.

>Australian farmer’s space junk discovery

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A cattle farmer in Australia’s remote northern outback believes a piece of space junk has landed on his property. Farmer James Stirton found a giant ball of twisted metal last year but only recently decided to look into its origins.

He now believes it is part of a rocket used to launch communications satellites.

Mr Stirton discovered the odd-shaped ball last year on his 40,000 hectare property, about 800 kilometres (500 miles) west of the northern Queensland state capital of Brisbane.

He said the object was hollow, and covered in a carbon-fibre material.

He has contacted some US-based aerospace companies to try to find out what the object really is.

Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum said it was not uncommon for people to find spacejunk in remote areas of Australia.

In 1979, large parts of the Skylab space station fell to earth near a tiny outback town in Australia’s west. A local council sent NASA a ticket for littering and the then United States President Jimmy Carter rang a local motel to apologise. –telegraph

It might not be space junk. Could be part of a planet that got eaten by a black hole on the other side of the Universe and was spit out in a small white hole that formed for a few seconds in Australia.

>Celestial-light device gets a down-to-earth patent

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It may not sound like serious science, but that giant moonbeam collector out in the desert west of Tucson now has a serious-looking official number.

Tanque Verde Swap Meet owner Richard Chapin’s $2 million Interstellar Light Collector was granted United States Patent # 7,338,178 B2 on March 4, after two denials.

Chapin says he built the huge night light collector — 84 eight-foot-by-four-foot polycarbonate mirrors — in hopes of helping a friend who had cancer. She died before he could help her, but he says the device has been highly successful on people with depression and has enjoyed moderate success with relieving asthma symptoms.

The patent has certainly cheered Chapin, although it’s far from a money machine. Chapin says that’s not the issue. On the three nights around full moon that they’re open, Chapin says they charge $25 for a treatment. That can range from just three minutes to 20 minutes — the maximum exposure so far. At 120 people treated each month, he and wife Monica and their family won’t be getting much return anytime soon. People stand in front of the focused beam of moon and starlight, or, when the moon is low, on a platform about five feet off the ground. Chapin thinks light therapy will catch on, so much so that he’s planning to build a 50-casita mini-health resort — “a Disneyland of healing” — on their 80-acre parcel off Arizona 86 about five miles west of Ryan Field. Chapin says they haven’t filed any plans yet, but that construction could commence within the next six months. –azs

I once saw a great band called “Full Moon Tan”. I liked their song “No money, no chick, no car.” I just did some research and found out that the drummer for Full Moon Tan just died a few years ago.

>Picnic Table Molester Released

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UPDATE: Charges have been dropped against 40-year-old Art Price, Jr., but he’s not yet in the clear, police say. Price was facing public indecency charges. The case has been turned over to the Huron County prosecutor. That office will conduct a full investigation and present the case before a grand jury.

Specific charges will depend on whether the school was in session at the time.

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BELLEVUE — Police say a man in Bellevue was caught on tape having sex with a picnic table. Bellevue Police Captain Matt Johnson says Art Price, Jr., 40, was seen on four occasions between the hours of 10:30 a.m. and noon having sex with his picnic table. What makes this a felony, Johnson says, is that it took place in close proximity to a school, which made it likely that children could have seen Price. The neighbor — who wishes to remain anonymous — saw Price walk out onto his deck, stand a round metal table on its side and use the hole for the umbrella to have sex.

The most recent instance took place March 14, we’re told. A neighbor videotaped Price. “The first video we had, he was completely nude. He would use the hole from the umbrella and have sex with the table,” Johnson says. Police say Price admitted to the crimes — four charges of public indecency. Usually these sorts of things are misdemeanors, but in this case, they are felonies. “What boosts it up to a felony is that the statute says if it’s likely to be viewed by a minor,” Johnson explains.

The Price family did not want to talk with us, but neighbors did. Some are not happy Price was released on his own recognizance. “He shouldn’t be allowed just for the fact that he could do that again — and nude that close to a school. That should be zero tolerance,” says Brice Jacobs, a neighbor. Price is married with three school-aged children. Neighbors tell us they’re now worried about the kids.

“Hopefully it stays between the adults and the kids don’t get a lot of the information so they aren’t so cruel to the little kids,” says Emily Grote, a neighbor. This case has police in this small town shaking their heads. “Once you think you’ve seen it all, something else comes around,” Johnson says. –wtol

Sure, why not. None of this will matter when a black hole eats the Earth.

>Salmonella Bacteria Turned Into Cancer Fighting Robots

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Salmonella bacteria can be turned into tiny terminator robots that venture deep into cancerous tumors where conventional chemotherapy can’t reach. Once in place, the bacteria manufacture drugs that destroy cancer cells. This could translate chemotherapy that is more specific, more effective and easier on patients.

Neil Forbes of the University of Massachusetts Amherst has received a four-year grant of more than $1 million from the National Institutes of Health to research killing cancer tumors with Salmonella bacteria. Forbes turns the bacteria into tiny terminator robots that use their own flagella to venture deep into tumors where conventional chemotherapy can’t reach. Once in place, the bacteria manufacture drugs that trigger cancer cells to kill themselves.

“When we get the Salmonella bacteria into the part of the tumor where we want them to be, we’ve programmed them to go ape,” says Forbes. “We have the bacteria release a drug to trigger a receptor in cancer cells called the “death receptor,” which induces cancer cells to kill themselves. We’ve already done this in the lab. We’ve done this successfully in cancerous mice, and it dramatically increases their survival rate.”

Normally, mice with tumors all die within 30 days. After receiving this bacterial system and getting a dose of radiation, all the mice in Forbes’ lab tests survived beyond the 30 days, which could potentially translate into many months or years in people.

“It sounds like science fiction, doesn’t it?” says Forbes, an assistant professor in the chemical engineering department. “But Salmonella are little robots that can swim wherever they want. They have propellers in the form of flagella, they have sensors to tell them where they are going and they are also little chemical factories. What we do as engineers is to control where they go, what chemical we want them to make, and when they make it.”

Using bacteria to attack cancer tumors has been tried with only moderate success for decades. But Forbes’ work with Salmonella is introducing a radical improvement called “targeted intratumoral therapeutic delivery,” which sends the bacteria into parts of the tumor that are currently beyond the reach of conventional therapies. This could translate into individualized doses of chemotherapy for human cancer patients, make therapy more specific and effective, give people smaller doses of chemicals while they are being treated and cut down on patient mortality.

The basic problem being addressed by Forbes is that some regions in any cancer tumor are impossible to reach with current chemotherapy drugs. Drug access to the tissue in any tumor is limited by the distribution of its blood vessels. Tissue located farthest from its surrounding blood vessels is the hardest for drugs to reach because the vessels act as their chemical highways into the tumor. Every tumor has a different distribution of blood vessels, depending on the nature of the tumor and the patient’s genetic makeup.

“Think of the region between blood vessels as a sponge,” explains Forbes. “The particles from a therapeutic drug tend to accumulate around the outer portions of the sponge, nearest the blood vessels, and not penetrate to the interior.”

That’s where an unlikely hero, the Salmonella bacterium, comes in. Unlike drugs (which are not alive), Salmonella can take energy from their environment and can “swim” wherever they please. They have their own outboard motors called flagella, and can travel where they want in a tumor, regardless of blood vessels. Forbes’ concept is to use special Salmonella disarmed of their toxicity and fix them with drug payloads so they can swim into these hard-to-reach regions of the tumor and kill the cancer cells there.

“The bacteria, as far as I can tell, are the only therapy that can penetrate deep into tissue, far beyond where blood vessels reach,” says Forbes.

Bacteria naturally seek out dead tissue for food by using sensors that home in on chemicals such as ribose, given off by dying cells. But Forbes doesn’t want his Salmonella robots going to the dead cancer cells already killed off by chemotherapy. He wants them penetrating to the slow-growing, but live, cancer cells that current therapy can’t touch. So his solution is to remove the ribose sensor from Salmonella.

“By knocking out the ribose receptor, we can keep the bacteria away from dead cells, where we don’t need them to go, but get them to travel into slow-growing cells located in hard-to-reach tissue far from blood vessels; the regions currently beyond our therapeutic treatment,” says Forbes.

Adapted from materials provided by University of Massachusetts Amherst. –  sciencedaily

>Google Cutting 300 Jobs at DoubleClick

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In the first sizable layoffs in its history, Google is cutting about 300 jobs from the American operations of DoubleClick, the advertising technology company that it acquired recently, according to a person with direct knowledge of Google’s plans.

The cuts represent about a quarter of DoubleClick’s American work force of about 1,200. The company has about 1,500 employees worldwide, and the chief executive of Google, Eric E. Schmidt, has suggested that job cuts would also affect DoubleClick’s overseas operations at a later date.

Google declined to confirm the number of layoffs.

In a statement, the company said: “Since our acquisition of DoubleClick closed on March 11, we have been working to match and align DoubleClick employees in the U.S. with our organizational plan for the business. As with many mergers, this review has resulted in a reduction in headcount at the acquired company.”- nyt

Good. I hope Google entirely stops DoubleClick’s privacy invasion.

*Doubleclick are the evil people who track you as you travel around the Internet and then gather your home address, e-mail, and phone number. If you surf around a dozen doubleclick affiliates they know it. Then if you log in to one, they capture your log in information and can send you targeted advertising. – fogcreek