Hyperbolic Headlines: A Black Hole in the Phone Line

As with the 'Flying Lemurs with Wiis' story (see post from Feb. 20), some science stories just beg to be exaggerated for the sake of a good headline. That's what's happening to a paper published in Science by a group of physicists from the University of St. Andrews in the UK. Some resultant headlines are:
Physicists Make Artificial Black Hole Using Optical Fiber (IEEE Spectrum Online)
Artificial Black Hole Created in Lab (Silobreaker)
Laser Light Re-creates 'Black Holes' in the Lab (Slashdot)
Scientists Can Now Create a Black Hole Event Horizon In The Lab (Newsvine)
Scientists Make Fake Black Hole In a Phone Line (Wired)
These headlines have seriously confused some readers, as evidenced by some comments on the Newsvine site. What actually happened, as shown in Dr. Ulf Leonhardt's own words (worth a look if a bit dense - he's obviously got a great sense of humor and a vocabulary much bigger than mine), is this: "In our experiment, we use ultrashort light pulses in microstructured optical fibers to demonstrate the formation of an artificial event horizon in optics. We create analogues of the horizon, not real black holes, they only act on light in the fibre, and our experiment is completely harmless."
In other words, what they made was an event horizon, not a black hole, real or otherwise. What is an event horizon? In an interview with Bob McDonald of the CBC's Quirks & Quarks, Dr. Leonhardt describes it as a "point of no return". He gives the example of fish in a river. As the river flows toward a waterfall, it speeds up. At a certain point, the water's velocity increases to a point where even the fastest fish can no longer swim upstream because they are being carried along too quickly by the current. This point is the event horizon, or point of no return.
So, why did they make an event horizon? The University of St. Andrew's press release explains that it "could allow physicists to investigate what happens to light at both sides of an event horizon - something they describe as a `feat that is utterly impossible in astrophysics'." That is, they can't look inside a black hole to see what happens to light on the other side of its event horizon, so they had to make an event horizon without a black hole in order to see what goes on there. They hope to soon use their optical-fiber event horizon to test some of Stephen Hawking's theories about light and black holes.