Was our universe born in a black hole?

Maybe so.

From the link:

“Accordingly, our own Universe may be the interior of a black hole existing in another universe.” So concludes Nikodem Poplawski at Indiana University in a remarkable paper about the nature of space and the origin of time.

The idea that new universes can be created inside black holes and that our own may have originated in this way has been the raw fodder of science fiction for many years. But a proper scientific derivation of the notion has never emerged.

And:

That means the universe as we see it today can be explained by a single theory of gravity without any additional assumptions about inflation.

Another important by-product of Poplawski’s approach is that it makes it possible for universes to be born inside the event horizons of certain kinds of black hole. Here, torsion prevents the formation of a singularity but allows a HUGE energy density to build up, which leads to the creation of particles on a massive scale via pair production followed by the expansion of the new universe.

This is a Big Bang type event. “Such an expansion is not visible for observers outside the black hole, for whom the horizon’s formation and all subsequent processes occur after infinite time,” says Poplawski.

For this reason, the new universe is a separate branch of space time and evolves accordingly.

Dirty ISPs better watch out

A new ranking system from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Indiana University will ferret out providers run by cybercriminals.

From the link (goes to Oak Ridge National Laboratory story tips for March 2010):

Cybercrime—Exposing hackers . . .

Unscrupulous Internet service providers will have no place to hide because of a ranking system conceived by researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Indiana University. “Criminal enterprises have created entire Internet service providers dedicated to sending spam, phishing messages or spreading viruses,” said Craig Shue of ORNL’s Computational Sciences and Engineering Division. While some have been caught by the Federal Trade Commission or other Internet service providers unwilling to do business with them, many are able to escape detection. “These other Internet service providers have customers whose machines become infected and can be used to launch attacks or steal the customer’s data,” Shue said. This work, which creates a ranking system Shue likened to grading systems for comparing school districts, is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and Indiana University.