Forget those stories about high levels of cyber-hits generated by news of Britney Spears or Amy Winehouse going into bad behaviour meltdown.
They've been spectacularly upstaged by a big underground machine that is being primed to re-create the origins of the universe the Big Bang.
In cyberspace, the world has gone crazy for the Large Hadron Collider a multi-billion dollar device that sends proton beams whizzing around a 27km circular tunnel on the outskirts of Geneva.
A rap video clip, showing dancing scientists in white lab coats and hard hats rappin' the LHC on location in those high-tech tunnels, had had more than 2.5 million hits on You Tube in the last four days. Kate MacAlpine (rap name: Alpinecat), a physics trainee with the team operating the high-energy particle accelerator, wrote the lyrics during her daily bus commute to work.
Yesterday's revelation that troubled British singer Amy Winehouse is buying a country farmhouse ''to escape her demons'' generated 47 news stories. Britney Spears did slightly better with around 60 stories on her MTV music awards makeover and plans for a Christmas album. But on Google News yesterday, there were just under 4000 news reports on the Large Hadron Collider's warm-up experiments, and the mix of elation and doomsday hysteria the switch-on had generated.
The Jerusalem Post ran a lengthy news feature, ''Why rabbis are unfazed by the quest for God's particle'', with religious leaders suggesting ''the more we understand about the universe the more we can appreciate God's creation.''
In Canada, angry letters to various newspapers suggested God's creation was being imperiled by '' a bunch of pointy-headed scientists''
The Financial Times wryly suggested British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown had ''launched his own version of the experiment, sending his entire cabinet to fan out in a 27km radius ... in the hope of colliding with sympathetic voters and discovering the magic policy that could save his Government.''
A robust disagreement between two high-profile physics professors Peter Higgs and Stephen Hawking over whether the collider will shed any light on the origins of matter, drew the lively headline ''Boffinly bitchslap brouhaha'' from an online science journal.
In the United States, a group called Citizens Against The Large Hadron Collider has filed a lawsuit trying to halt the project, and a British couple got coverage in the red-top tabloids by announcing they were staging their own Big Bang to coincide with the first atom-collision run in Switzerland. ''We think we did better than them,'' was their verdict.
The first proton beam was fired off in a clockwise direction around the tunnel on Wednesday morning, followed by a second anti-clockwise beam. The next stage involved experiments with low-energy collisions between the beams, to allow scientists to adjust instruments.
The first high-energy collisions will not occur until after the collider is officially launched on October 21.
But there's already been fearful speculation that the high-energy ''atom smashing'' machine will create black holes with enough gravitational pull to swallow the Earth.
University of Chicago astrophysicist, Professor Edward Kolb says this won't happen.
''Nature has already done this experiment. It was done in the early universe,'' he said.
''Cosmic rays have hit the moon with more energy and have not produced a black hole that has swallowed up the moon. The universe doesn't go around popping off huge black holes.''
Buoyed by the global wave of interest in the project, scientists have launched a competition, with a 500 ($A1100) prize, to fund a catchier name for the particle collider.
They think Large Hadron Collider doesn't do it justice and ''fails to reflect the drama of its mission, or the inspiration it should be conveying to the wider public.''