What do these three things have in common: a mysterious, donut-shaped belt of plasma wrapped around the Earth; the warp engines on the starship USS Enterprise; and a laboratory at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) outside Geneva, Switzerland?
The answer is that they all involve the most powerful energy source in the universe, something so familiar to us from science fiction that I've already felt the necessity to reference "Star Trek." But it is something that really does exist: antimatter.
In their laboratory, the CERN scientists have actually made this exotic stuff, which is the opposite of normal matter and is currently the world's most expensive form of energy. Last week, a collaboration of scientists, including Yasunori Yamazaki from the University of Tokyo, announced that they had created and trapped atoms of the antimatter form of hydrogen (antihydrogen) — and stored them for more than 15 minutes.