Another weekend and another couple of days of thinking about something other than the pissed up world of politics.  It is refreshing not to think about the morons we elect…..

Remember in almost every episode and movie in the Star Trek series…..Scotty would always report that there was some sort of engine problem like an anti-matter imbalance that would destroy the warp coils or something just as destructive?

Well, that is out of the way………I do not know just how much we spend as a nation or a planet trying to create and then capture an anti-matter molecule…..in Cern Switzerland or some place in the Midwest we have these huge colliders that are used to create anti-matter….okay, but just what is anti-matter?

Let Wikipedia help……

In particle physics, antimatter is the extension of the concept of the antiparticle to matter, where antimatter is composed of antiparticles in the same way that normal matter is composed of particles. For example, a positron (the antiparticle of the electron or e+
) and an antiproton (p) can form an antihydrogen atom in the same way that an electron and a proton form a normal matter hydrogen atom. Furthermore, mixing matter and antimatter can lead to the annihilation of both in the same way that mixing antiparticles and particles does, thus giving rise to high-energy photons (gamma rays) or other particle–antiparticle pairs. The result of antimatter meeting matter is an explosion

In other words anti-matter is very difficult to create and capture….if only there were another way to get the anti-matter we need to study …..here’s an idea……

The find, described in Astrophysical Journal Letters, confirms theoretical work that predicted the Earth’s magnetic field could trap antimatter.

The team says a small number of antiprotons lie between the Van Allen belts of trapped “normal” matter.

The researchers say there may be enough to implement a scheme using antimatter to fuel future spacecraft.

The antiprotons were spotted by the Pamela satellite (an acronym for Payload for Antimatter Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics) – launched in 2006 to study the nature of high-energy particles from the Sun and from beyond our Solar System – so-called cosmic rays.

The new analysis, described in an online preprint, shows that when Pamela passes through a region called the South Atlantic Anomaly, it sees thousands of times more antiprotons than are expected to come from normal particle decays, or from elsewhere in the cosmos.The team says that this is evidence that bands of antiprotons, analogous to the Van Allen belts, hold the antiprotons in place – at least until they encounter the normal matter of the atmosphere, when they “annihilate” in a flash of light.

Although normal matter particles outweigh the antiprotons by thousands to one, the band is “the most abundant source of antiprotons near the Earth”, said Alessandro Bruno of the University of Bari, a co-author of the work.

If possible….look at the cash that this discovery could save the world……

I know I am a political nerd, but stuff like this just fascinates the crap out of me….and as you can imagine….that could get a bit messy……

Enjoy your weekend!