I heard a story about this on the radio Saturday and it cracked me up. Talk about taking “fear in the media” to the extreme… I’ve heard about murders and robberies, floods, tornados, etc. But when was the last time you heard about the end of the universe? This NYT article does a great job of explaining the story from both sides, keeping a bit of tongue-in-cheek but also a bit of genuine concern. An excerpt:

…Walter L. 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.”