Hi slang,

Certainly, "problematic" would extend to G&M's paper, the purpose of which is to guarantee the safety of the LHC. And you're right that by "problematic" they did not intend that world destruction would be immanent as in the next four years: their lower bound was 3 x 10⁵ years (eq. 4.52, p. 26). That's a little too close for comfort, as G&M point out on p. 27.

Regarding the white dwarf section, I'm still trying to digest it, but at one point they attempt to assess the sensitivity of their stopping length estimate: "From (5.33) we easily find less than 25% variation in the resulting bound on δ_NR as long as

So for the case 5-D mBH's (D=5), wouldn't that make the whole denominator equal to zero, hence driving the whole equation to infinity (which is presumably larger than c_sc (the column density, I think). In which case, their stopping lengths for 5-D mBH's would in fact be poorly constrained. Probably, there is something wrong with my reasoning here. I'm fully willing to acknowledge an mistakes you can point out.

As for the Dereshev et al. paper, they want $32 USD for the privilege to read the rest of it. A desultory attack on the Springerlink website resulted in total failure. . . .