More than a year after an explosion of sparks, soot and frigid helium shut it down, the world's biggest and most expensive physics experiment, known as the Large Hadron Collider, is poised to start up again. In December, if all goes well, protons will start smashing together in an underground racetrack outside Geneva in a search for forces and particles that reigned during the first trillionth of a second of the Big Bang.

Then it will be time to test one of the most bizarre and revolutionary theories in science. I'm not talking about extra dimensions of space-time, dark matter or even black holes that eat the Earth. No, I'm talking about the notion that the troubled collider is being sabotaged by its own future. A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.

Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, put this idea forward in a series of papers with titles like "Test of Effect From Future in Large Hadron Collider: a Proposal" and "Search for Future Influence From LHC," posted on the physics Web site arXiv.org in the last year and a half.

A new exhibition marking the 400th anniversary of Galileo's work is set to open in the Vatican.

The Catholic Church once labelled Galileo, now regarded as modern astronomy's founding father, a heretic.

He was tried for challenging the widely held belief that the sun travelled around the Earth.

Although Copernicus did much ground-breaking work on the link between the sun and the Earth, it was Galileo's instruments that proved the theory.

It was not until 1992 that Pope John Paul II declared that the Church's ruling was an error and that Catholics were not hostile to science.

A leading sexual health organisation has praised the Netherlands for its liberal approach to sex, which has helped the country achieve one of the world's lowest abortion rates. A study released by the US-based Guttmacher Institute found there has been a global drop in the number of women choosing to terminate unwanted pregnancies.

"The Netherlands' example ought to be an inspiration for the rest of the world. You start when people are young and give them an unambiguous message, which is: human sexuality is fine, it's part of life, we hope you will wait to have sex until you're in a committed relationship but in any case it's not alright to become a parent before you're ready to raise a child and it's not alright to pass on a disease."

Decrease in abortions
Abortions decreased worldwide from around 45.5 million in 1995 to 41.6 million in 2003, which Dr Camp described as a positive development.

"Most of the findings in the new report are good news. Around the world we see significant declines in both the numbers and rates of abortion. The main reason for that is that there has also been a significant decline in unintended pregnancy.... Overall, contraceptive use has increased from a little over half, to almost two thirds of women around the world."
 

Work is good for you, according to a new study, which concluded that disgruntled workers dreaming of early retirement may want to think again.

Older people who hold temporary or part-time jobs after retirement enjoy better physical and mental health than those who stop working entirely, according to the US study, which was released on Tuesday.

Those who continue to work in their original field also have better mental health than those who change fields, according to the study published in the October issue of the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, a magazine published by the American Psychological Association.

The law firm Carter-Ruck has made a fresh move that could stop an MPs' debate next week by claiming a controversial injunction it has obtained is "sub judice".

The move follows the revelation of the existence of a secret "super-injunction" obtained by the firm on behalf of the London-based oil traders Trafigura.

The injunction not only bans disclosure of a confidential report on Trafigura and toxic waste, but also banned disclosure of the injunction's very existence, until it was revealed by an MP this week under parliamentary privilege.

Carter-Ruck partner Adam Tudor today sent a letter to the Speaker, John Bercow, and also circulated it to every single MP and peer, saying they believed the case was "sub judice".