But all that doesn't anti-matter Now we found ourselves a black hole in space

This is not an eye-catching title* for a SRS PAYPA in a rear-previewed academical journal, so it almost sailed unnoticed past our vigilance and slipped under the radar of our metaphors.
Part of the Riddled mission statement is to monitor the Existential Threat situation, where as any fule know a threat is 'existential' if it leads to fear and trembling. "Seen any Existential Threats today?" I will ask AK at smoko after a long morning of unblinking attention to the journals and the CCTV screens. "Nope. You?" "Me neither. Though I did see a squirrel."

The menacing part is in the Discussion section:

What Chirumbolo et al. are proposing is that a histamine molecule in water can cause the water molecules to arrange themselves around it in a kind of quasi-crystalline cluster -- a cluster having the same chemical and biological properties as the histamine itself. Further, the clusters are self-replicating: they can catalyse the formation of copies of themselves across multiple stages of dilution and succussion. This is a whole new polymorph of H₂O, more stable at room temperature than liquid water.**


If a sample escaped from the laboratory it would nucleate a change of state of all the water in the ocean into more quasi-crystals (the Katz-Cray-Dell effect). This always ends badly, with waterspouts and mass extinctions and a nigh-universal inhibition of CD203c membrane up-regulation in human basophils.




But wait; another homeopathic threat to life on earth stands revealed:

69
But scientists who guided their studies based on [homeopathic] theory failed to make progress.
How can you say that, when the Materia Medica has grown to include 'homeopathic positronium' and 'homeopathic shipwreck'?! PROGRESS!

Posted by: herr doktor bimler | May 10, 2012 5:45 PM

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herr doktor bimler @69
You forgot homeopathic light of Saturn. Perhaps we should hold a contest for the most ludicrous homeopathic preparation. Or perhaps not due to the risk of creating a homeopathic black hole of stupidity.

Posted by: Militant Agnostic | May 10, 2012 7:26 PM

TOO LATE! Behold the horror that is Homeopathic Black Hole!

PREPARATION The remedy was prepared by Rowan Jackson and astronomer, Peter Lipscomb, using an 8" telescope, Meade LX90 aperture telescope. A vial of alcohol was affixed to the viewing end as the telescope was focused on Cygnus X-1’s location within the Cygnus constellation.
COMPILATION Lori Foley and Sandra Haering, with students and alumni of the Northwestern Academy of Homeopathy.
METHODOLOGY Twenty provers took the remedy administered in 30C potencies. The proving was double blind format in which neither the supervisors nor the provers were aware of the substance they were taking. During the proving, provers logged symptoms on a daily basis and were in daily contact with their supervisor until symptoms subsided.

Exposure to H.b.h. (i.e. consumption of alcohol that had been in extremely indirect contact with alcohol that had been exposed to visible light from the general direction of an X-ray source) causes a variety of symptoms. These are precisely the symptoms for which H.b.h. might be prescribed. It inspires some skepticism, however, that the list of effects fails to mention baldness, or a renewed loathing for Disney Studio movies.

* Also eye-catching.

** Let us draw a discrete veil over their shonky statistics. They use multiple comparisons without a Bonferonni correction, and the Friedman non-parametric test for unmatched samples -- where the Kruskal-Wallis test is appropriate.