Mad Scientists Try to Destroy the Earth Today

That deafening sucking roar you hear this afternoon might not just be the Dolphins bumbling through their midweek practice.

It might, in fact, be the sound of your impending doom. Early this morning, a cabal of cackling, evil scientists gathered around their fiendish creation deep beneath the soil in Switzerland, flipped the switch, raised their hands in the air and screamed in unison -- "It's alive!". Their goal? Total world domination.
OK, maybe that's just Riptide's take on the situation. As a clever front, the scientists are supposedly using the "Large Hadron Collider" to ram tiny particles into each other at insane speeds to try to reproduce the conditions of the Big Bang. Here's how it works, according to a mind-blowing NY Times graphic that Riptide isn't going to pretend it came close to understanding.

But there's apparently a very real possibility that things could go a wee bit wrong with all those particles slamming head-on into one another. How wrong?

How about accidentally creating a black hole that swallows the entire planet Earth? Or, in what sounds like an even cooler way to kill every human being, the accelerator may create "strangelets" of strange matter, which would also apparently eat the entire planet.

So enjoy that afternoon latte, champ. You can hide under your desk when the black hole and a parade of strangelets comes calling, but the mad scientists have probably already won.

-- Tim Elfrink