Big robots in science fiction are almost always slow. Especially big robots in the comics. I think it's caused by too many years of old sci-fi movies in which robots were played by people in bulky costumes that made it hard to move. If your idea of a how a robot should move was influenced by Robbie the Robot, you're going to make robots slow.

Fortunately, I'm not constrained by the boundaries of tradition. Or good taste.

Anyway, on to the world of science: Black holes! Inside the solar system! Lurking closer than Pluto! Okay, now that the humorous hysteria is over, this is one of those interesting questions in science that make you realize how neat the universe is.

Scientists at Duke University are suggesting that we may be able to search for primordial black holes created in the moments after the Big Bang. Current theory says that these small black holes would have dissolved away by now because they lose mass to Hawking radiation. However, if the Randall-Sundrum model of brane theory is correct, black holes would dissolve away more slowly and some of those primordial black holes would therefore still be left over from the Big Bang.

In fact, the scientists at Duke say there should be enough primordial black holes around that thousands of them should exist inside the solar system. They intend to use a search for gravitational lensing to find these black holes and test their theory.

Even a negative result is meaningful, since it makes it that much more likely that the Randall-Sundrum model is incorrect. In science, a failed experiment is still useful. (The canonical relatively recent example of this is the Michelson-Morley experiment, which failed to detect the aether, helping to open the door for Einstein's Relativity.)