I feel so much better now.

Turns out that the Earth is not in danger of being swallowed up by a precision engineered, man-made black hole that stinks of exotic cheese and Gauloise cigarettes.

That's right, the BBC says that the Large Hadron Collider opening soon on the Swiss-French border won't kill us all.

"Critics have previously raised concerns that the production of weird hypothetical particles called strangelets in the LHC could trigger the mass conversion of nuclei in ordinary atoms into more strange matter - transforming the Earth into a hot, dead lump."

At least it'll probably be a dry heat, right? But it's okay, because the reality is that there's no conceivable danger that it'll happen. In the words of the report:

"Over the past billions of years, nature has already generated on Earth as many collisions as about a million LHC experiments - and the planet still exists."

So there.

I love this stuff.

If you want to, read the full article.

What doesn't kill the planet...probably still kills the planet.

Bio-diesel burners beware. Ethanol producers, stop what you're doing. Step away from the corn...

You are killing the Gulf of Mexico.

You bastards.

Okay, in all fairness, it's really just the flooding speeding things up, but hey, why not sensationailze?

So there is justice in the world...

Just as I was beginning to lose all hope in a just and ordered universe presided over by a benevolent superbeing, this happened:

** Pop mogul gets 25 years for fraud **
Lou Pearlman, who created Backstreet Boys and 'N Sync, is sentenced to 25 years in prison for a $300m fraud.

Sadly, the indictment fails to cover the actual creation of said boy bands, but hey, they had to get Al Capone on tax evasion, so we'll take what we can get.