A lawsuit is claiming that the Large Hadron Collider, about to go into operation just outside of Geneva, Switzerland, may generate a black hole that will swallow the Earth and even possibly end the universe as we know it, according to the New York Times.  The LHC, fourteen years in the making and 27 kilometers in circumference, will collide high speed (think just under the speed of light) beams of protons.  The collisions will take place over hours, and scientists will analyze the fragments, hoping to learn more about the immediately post-Big Bang universe.  It's scheduled to begin running in May.

However, Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho have filed suit in Honolulu, hoping to put a stop to the collider's activities before they begin.  The suit claims that safety concerns have been downplayed by CERN scientists, including the risks that the collider could produce a small black hole, or a "strangelet" which would turn the planet into a small lump of "strange matter."  There's also the matter of a claim that CERN didn't file an environmental impact statement.  The suit was filed in Hawaii because the U.S. Department of Energy, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the National Science Foundation and CERN are all listed as defendants.  (And the men pressing the suit are trying to save money by not filing in Europe.)  It should also be noted that Wagner previously filed a pre-emptive suit against the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory, a collider which has operated without incident since 2000.

The head of communcations at CERN, James Gillies, said, "It's hard to see how a district court in Hawaii has jurisdiction over an intergovernmental organization in Europe."

According to CERN, safety studies have been performed, including one last year.  Michelangelo Mangano, a CERN scientist who participated in the Safety Assessment Group, said, "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."

Dr. Mangano and Steve Giddings (UCSB) have been collaborating on a paper, based on the safety assessment, to determine all possible scenarios, including the "black hole" hypothesis, which could be generated, theoretically, according to "some variants of string theory," but would also evaporate, acording to current understanding of black hole theory.  The paper is still being peer-reviewed at this time.

In short, there is a non-zero chance that the world will end next month.  However, according to the people in the position to know best, "non-zero" still means "really damned unlikely, so pay your credit card bill on time anyway."