Leader: Antimatter's storage abilities good reason for awe
In the Da Vinci Code novel of Dan Brown, antimatter is used as a weapon of mass destruction: just half a gramme would have the explosive force of 20 Hiroshimas. Making a few grammes of it would be very dangerous - but would take billions of years.
For the lay person, the questions pile up. If it's antimatter, how do we know it is there? If it can be stored, would a cardboard box do, or does it demand something sturdier? You wouldn't want it to leak, in case it wiped out adjoining matter. And what would happen if you lost it?
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Hide AdThe boffins at CERN say they have successfully stored antimatter made from hydrogen for more than 16 minutes by using a state-of-the-art superconducting magnet to suspend the anti-atoms away from the walls, to store the anti-hydrogen.
But as matter and antimatter destroy each other on contact, we do hope they know what they are doing. This is the sort of stuff that makes a jar of last year's decomposing chutney seem benign.