I have to admit that last night when I went to bed I worried whether I would wake up this morning in a black hole. That's because, in case you hadn't heard, an experiment to recreate the Big Bang was being conducted in Switzerland.
Check out this article for an in-depth explanation of how this thing works. The Large Hadron Collider is supposed to help scientists understand why things have mass and what the universe is made of. Of course, those aren't the only reasons for the LHC to exist, scientists want to recreate the conditions right before the Big Bang supposedly happened. The hope to learn something from this experiment, which basically is sending particles into space and smashing them against each other really hard and really fast, creating black holes in space.
No worries, say the scientists. The black holes will evaporate before anyone even has a chance to notice. The LHC will notice, however, and will record these findings.
But not everyone sees this as a big leap for mankind. Some people fear that the LHC will have catastrophic consequences and that it should be stopped, despite the scientific community's assurance that we'll be fine. This has definitely sparked the public's interest in science and space. This isn't the first time a technological advance has made people freak out (remember Gallileo?), and no doubt it won't be the last.
And hey, if the thing does make a black hole that sucks us into oblivion, at least we could say we went out with a bang!