Can you use the end of the world to sell a story? The switch-on of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider took the world’s media by storm in September 2008 after rumours started to circulate that it could generate tiny black holes. Physicists and engineers were confident that, even if this happened, these would disappear instantaneously and could not grow to swallow up the Earth, but the myth persisted and even resulted in a court case against CERN. How far can journalists and press officers collude to raise interest in otherwise standard stories? Or, when exhaustive safety assessments had already shown the risk of disaster to be negligible, was it legitimate gratefully to ride the wave of publicity? The session will also ask: who needs media stunts when you can ride a comet and crash into the Sun?; and does it take a disaster to get engineers into the media?Multimedia files