Strings and Black Holes:. AN Emergence of Patterns?

Two solutions have been proposed in order to resolve the conundrum of trans-GZK cosmic rays which have not been disproved yet by data: excitation of string-like structures with a characteristic energy scale of the order of a few TeV and the productionn of "mini black holes" with a comparable characteristic scale. We suggest that these two approaches are, in fact, equivalent: there is no physical distinction between a highly excited string state and a "mini black hole".