Dan Brown’s antimatter

This Western Mail article about a project to create antimatter might just have the most uninspiring introduction in the history of popular science journalism:

WELSH scientists are in a bid to trap antimatter – the energy source which Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown says could lead to world destruction.

In bestseller Brown’s novel Angels and Demons a secret brotherhood hatches an evil plot to snatch antimatter from the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva. The Pope and Vatican are then threatened with an antimatter bomb which decimates all living matter.

Antimatter is also credited with powering Star Trek’s USS Enterprise to warp drive under the stewardship of TV hero Captain Jim Kirk.

But in today’s reality a team at the University of Wales, Swansea, aims to be the first in the world to net and study antimatter atoms.

[...]

About 50% of the article is about the work of Dan Brown, not the scientists.

Actually, some of the science is a bit worrying too:

This is a study which could eventually [... cure cancer ...] because antimatter could be used to cancel out matter such as cancerous cells.

Perhaps there have been some developments since I last read about antimatter, but it strikes me that whilst applying antimatter would certainly “cancel out” the cancerous cells, you might not want to be in the vicinity when it happens.

[Via Found]