Newborn planet may be younger than Christianity
Researchers have spotted the youngest planet to date—an embryonic "protoplanet" still embedded in its birthing material. U.K. researchers trained radio telescope arrays at Jodrell Bank in England and the Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico toward the star HL Tau, 520 light-years away, where they identified a clump of small pebbles that they believe will condense into a gas giant planet some 14 times heavier than Jupiter. The star itself is thought to be no more than 100,000 years old (compared with the sun's 4.6 billion years), but researchers say the planet could have formed as recently as 1,600 years ago, kicked off by a gravitational nudge from another star wandering past. (Royal Astronomical Society)

LHC doomsday lawsuit questions physicists' instincts for self-preservation
Concerned individuals are out to save the world—from particle accelerators. According to news reports, a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Hawaii last month alleges that CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) researchers have not sufficiently investigated the possibility that they will unleash a world-destroying mini–black hole when they fire up the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), an enormous $8-billion particle accelerator set to go on line later this year near Geneva, Switzerland. Walter Wagner, a former radiation safety officer and cosmic-ray physicist living in Hawaii, raised similar concerns in 1999 over an accelerator in Long Island, N.Y., that ended up not destroying the world. This time, he and a second plaintiff are seeking a temporary restraining order against CERN until it proves the safety of the new machine, the largest ever of its kind. Physicists have repeatedly dismissed the notion of runaway black holes or any other disastrous consequences from such experiments. A spokesman for CERN, which lies well outside of Hawaii's jurisdiction, told reporters it is updating a 2003 study to address Wagner's lingering concerns. (LHCConcerns.com)

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