Are black holes the ruthless killers we've made them out to be, a professor of physics at Ohio State University asks. The paper has been published on the pre-publication site arXiv where the professor sets out to prove, mathematically, that black holes are not necessarily arbiters of doom.
The same professor, over ten years ago, used string theory to show black holes are actually tangled up cosmic string. When material touches the surface of a black hole it becomes a hologram, a near perfect copy of itself (that continues to exist). One of the tenets of string theory is that our three dimensional existence might actually be a hologram on a surface that exists in many other dimensions – see http://phys.org/print353690487.html