While looking at some websites listing gardening products, as I do from time to time, I was surprised and rather pleased to learn that the community of researchers to which I belong, which spends some of its time trying to understand the properties of black holes -especially small ones-, may be contributing to society in unexpectedly direct ways. It seems that black holes are being used as traps for gophers, rats and moles! Link to instructions here. No manufacturing details given, but I imagine they're made of D-branes, at least in some description.

The picture on the right is the trap out of the box. [update: stock photo! I have no interest in using such a trap!] Now I imagine that stuff we can see is some sort of clever containment device that somehow keeps the thing stable (the things probably evaporate rapidly at this size, so they'll have to have figured out how to get around that). Impressive. -cvj (This reminds me of a post I did a while ago.)