Andrea Valeria Diaz Tolivia

Poco antes de las seis de la madrugada del martes 5 de noviembre, la atmósfera a bordo de la Línea 4 del metro de Nueva York se respiraba tensa, inquieta, como si la muchedumbre que descendía desde el barrio afroamericano de Harlem hacia el downtown de Manhattan —algunos con los ojos fijos en las encuestas que brillaban en las pantallas de sus celulares, delatando ansiedad; otros con la mirada perdida en el vacío, disociados— se hubiera puesto de acuerdo para contener todos a la vez el aliento....

Antimatter is one of science’s great mysteries. It is produced all around us for fractions of a second, until it collides with matter, and the particles annihilate one another. But what is it?

Antimatter is just like matter, except for one thing. Its particles have the same mass as ordinary matter, but an opposite charge. For example, an electron has a negative charge, so an anti-electron—called a positron—weighs the same, but has a positive charge.

Antimatter is a natural product of some types of radioactive decay and cosmic ray collisions, but it can also be made in particle colliders here on Earth. But making antimatter particles this way is difficult and expensive—let alone controlling them enough to create an entire anti-atom. NASA estimates that creating a gram of antimatter would cost about $62.5 trillion.

But why does antimatter matter? It may hold the key to understanding one of the universe’s biggest mysteries: why there’s something rather than nothing. Cosmologists say that during the Big Bang, matter and antimatter should have been created in equal amounts. But everything around us today is mostly matter, meaning either that there was an excess of matter created, or that matter and antimatter don’t quite follow the rules physicists expect.

Recently, scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider spotted 16 instances of the heaviest exotic antimatter nucleus observed to date: antihyperhydrogen-4.

To explore what this breakthrough means for antimatter research, SciFri producer Charles Bergquist talks to Dr. Jamie Dunlop, associate department chair for nuclear physics at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

You might be familiar with a gigabyte, one of the most popular units of measure for computer storage. A two-hour movie is 3 gigabytes on average, while your phone can probably store 256 gigabytes.

But did you know that your body also stores information in its own way?

We see this in DNA, which has the instructions needed for an organism to develop, survive, and reproduce. In computing storage terms, each cell of our body contains about 1.5 gigabytes worth of data. And with about 30 trillion cells in our bodies, we could theoretically store about 45 trillion gigabytes—also known as 45 zettabytes—which is equivalent to about one fourth of all the data in the world today.

Recently, a group of researchers was able to develop a technology that allows computer storage and processing using DNA’s ability to store information by turning genetic code into binary code. This technology could have a major impact on the way we do computing and digital storage.

To explain more about this technology, SciFri guest host Sophie Bushwick is joined by two professors from North Carolina State University’s Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Dr. Albert Keung and Dr. Orlin Velev.