Does anybody else think the top picture looks like it has part of a guitar in it?

@Annalee: How else can you play Guitar Hero during those long space flights?

Heh. I think I saw a member of Parliment Funkadelic playing that spaceship back in the 80s.

I know people who've worked as model-makers for the likes of LucasArts/ILM, etc. They would regularly cannibalize model kits for any interesting-looking bits to glue onto Imperial Star Destroyers, etc. In fact, the butt-end of the Imperial AT-AT features the upper-body of a WWII German SdKfz 222 recon armored car!

One of most important things to remember it that a ship needs intelligent life to pilot it and I think that we fall far short of that here on the 3rd rock from the sun! All the models are cool but the really interesting part is that this is scientifically possible - but then again so are car engines that run on water - but I don't see many of them on the streets!

@Annalee: No, It's a Banjo!

Antimatter can't be "found" or harvested ... it's got to be :- :-0 :) :-Z as well as ::-\]]} > 2/2.

Then again, anything with a proton gun just has to work...

It's got 12 machine heads! On each of 2 necks!

It's a dual necked 3-D 12-string superguitar! Ah, Rick Nielsen probably already owns one.

Ouch. Io9 ... it's only your second week so I'll forgive you for this one. Antimatter doesn't release a ton of energy when it's created - it releases a ton of energy when it combines with regular matter and annihilates.

From Wikipedia: "The particles resulting from matter-antimatter annihilation are endowed with energy equal to the difference between the rest mass of the products of the annihilation and the rest mass of the original matter-antimatter pair, which is often quite large"

@michealk: No energy released when that positron and electron slam into each other? Really?

It can be stored

@annalee: No, it's the article that is incorrect-- You wrote: "The principle behind antimatter is simple. It releases a ton of energy when it's created".

The opposite is true. In reality anti-matter releases a ton of energy when it is annhiliated when coming in contact with normal matter. I think either you typed "created" when you meant "destroyed" or you are assuming that by creating anti-matter it will always be destroyed immediately.

Theoretically it is possible to capture anti-matter in a magnetic bottle and store it safely away from that pesky normal matter.

Seriously, it must be difficult and extremely dangerous to store antimatter. It would annihilate its container... unless the container is made out of antimatter, but then what would you mount it in?

This post is pretty shoddy guys here's why:

1. The already pointed out basic error about energy release

2. The 'discovery' that antimatter is all around us. well that's not new news. My humble understanding of it is that even if it did reign down all around us in the absence of sufficiently high temperatures or a high energy magnetic field it would instantly decay. In any rate - it's already common knowledge that anti-matter is not just at the center of the galaxy - there is a large clump there but it is all over the shop. Google the 'Van Allen Belt' for our closest bunch.

3. That nature article is talking about the distribution of positrons coming from the center of the galaxy and how this can be attributed to x-ray binaries not DARK matter as some have speculated. dark matter for the record, is not another name for anti-matter.

4. The anti-matter as space propulsion thing. Haven't heard that in a while. It's old, that picture is old. That penn state project is old - and now defunct. They haven't even updated their website since 2001.NASA were researching it once upon a time but had their funding cut in about 2003. (SO either nothings happening or they've cracked it already and are keeping it on the down low.)

@ven.batista: Well mostly this article is about pictures of antimatter ships that people have imagined, not actual ships they are building. In addition, if you think that Nature erred in claiming that it's a new discovery that antimatter originates outside the galactic core, well, direct that to them. I was just reporting on their news.

@flumbo: OK, I'm fixing that.

In case any non-nerdlings are reading these comments, I want to point out that the existence of antimatter powered ships do not go hand in hand with warp drive or any kind of FTL (faster than light) travel.

The major breakthrough here is a clean, efficient power source that will create gobs of energy for long periods of time.

It might still be a while before we can move beyond our own solar system in a reasonable span of time.

--end PSA--

@Ken: It'd be funny if someone invented some kind of warp drive without figuring out how to create a clean, super-efficient power source--so we had FTL spaceships, but they all ran on gasoline.

@braak: You have to start them with a ripcord like your lawnmower. They shoot out clouds of back smoke and are all loud and rattly.

What kind of punk is it when it's 80s retropunk? Petropunk, I guess.

@braak: HA! PETROPUNK! I love it!

You gotta float that one around and start your own niche. Scifi that revolves around the wide adoption and usage of fossil fuels.

Wait...uh, we kinda have that already. Well, I'm sure you could take it further...

Diesel powered transporters (everyone is beamed up wearing a trucker hat, whether they were originally wearing one or not) and Kerosene-based lifeforms (their homeworld's a Victorian paradise)

And so on...

It makes me wonder if, in a hundred years, there's gonig to be silicon punk. "Oh, man, remember back in the old days when they made computers out of melted sand? Wouldn't it be crazy if they built our modern algaeic neural quantum nets out of that shit? That'd be off the wall!

Well either you have linked to the wrong news on nature or you are mis-reporting their news. There is nothing wrong with their news.

I'm sorry if you think I'm nitpicking but is this not a misleading statement:

"Believe it or not, there's actually an entire lab devoted to antimatter space propulsion at Penn State (the image you see here is their AIMstar)."

I like this site - it's a cool idea and a fun place to dig around. But if you can't see it when people are trying to help you out by making your posts more relevant and factually correct you will lose readers.