Antimatter is mysterious, dangerous, and rare. In fiction, it's at the core of Isaac Asimov's positronic brains, the engines on the Enterprise, and the bomb in Dan Brown's Angels and Demons. But in the real world, antimatter is fairly mundane stuff. If the entire universe turned into antimatter, we'd barely notice. Or…

While the Large Hadron Collider is looking for the Higgs boson, we're on the verge of two huge antimatter-related breakthroughs. One could finally solve the universe's oldest mystery, while the other could reveal strange new particles that are perfect for quantum computers.

Let's face it: It's only a matter of time until Mars comes after us. We've got lots of water. It doesn't. We've got life. It doesn't. All this might have been okay, but then we alerted Mars to our presence with our various satellites and rovers, and now it's just a matter of time. Here are some ways we might destroy…

The Large Hadron Collider is constantly on the hunt for "new physics" — discoveries that confound and expand our current understanding of the universe... and it may have found one in the decay patterns of a subatomic particle and its antimatter counterpart.

Cosmic rays bring our planet a steady stream of protons, electrons, and other particles. As these collide with nuclei in the upper atmosphere, they create new particles, including antiprotons. And some of this antimatter is sticking around above our world.

If you're like the rest of us, you're almost certainly made of matter. But where did all that delicious, gooey matter come from? In this In this week's "Ask a Physicist" we'll find out.

There's nothing in the laws of physics that actually requires matter to dominate antimatter, and yet all our observations of the universe suggest that that's the case. But some unexpected behavior by ghostly neutrino particles could solve the antimatter mystery.

This seems like a straightforward enough question, but we actually have no idea whether gravity repels or attracts antimatter, all because we've never actually managed to trap enough antimatter at once to test it. That may be about to change.

The Extreme Light Infrastructure is a new project that will build three incredibly powerful new lasers. Capable of creating energy pulses 20 times more powerful than anything before, these new lasers could help us probe the world of weird physics.

Are we ever going to use antimatter to drive a starship?