The next month should see further action in the doomsday lawsuit filed in March - the one claiming that mini-black holes from Europe's Large Hadron Collider could destroy the world. The plaintiffs in the case, Luis Sancho and Walter Wagner, want the CERN particle-physics center to put the $8 billion project on hold until more questions about such a scenario (and others) are answered to their satisfaction.

Have you heard the latest doomsday scenario? In thirty years, the internet will stop working! Apparently, a bug similar to the millennium bug will affect Unix-based systems, like those that run the tubes, in the year 2038. The bug, being dubbed the "2038 bug," arises because Unix-based systems store the time as a signed 32-bit integer, in seconds, from midnight on January 1 1970. And the latest time that can be represented in that format, by the Posix standard, is 3:14 AM on January 19, 2038. After that, times will wrap around and be represented as a negative number.

Belief in the end of the world may be very old, and it is certainly not a delusion unique to evangelical Christians. But for more than thirty years now, there has been a growing phenomenon of a particular type of eschatological thinking among some evangelical churches. In the United States it has given birth to a whole subculture that, according to polls, has recruited many millions of American citizens who apparently hold that certain passages of scripture describe the coming destruction of the world in our era. Where you have a subculture, it is likely that you will find people with merchandise to sell to it. The End Times – for that is how the Apocalyptics refer to this prelude to Armageddon – have created a vigorous market of mass extinction tat: novels, DVDs, bumper stickers. The internet, naturally, is lousy with this stuff.