Scientists Confirm Existence of ‘Kirby Krackle’

As pointed out last week by comics creator Rick Veitch, scientists have made an incredible breakthrough in the study of antimatter that yielded the first ever creation and capture of antihydrogen, which looks almost exactly like the ubiquitous "Kirby Krackle" visual effect innovated by the legendary comics artist many decades ago.In a detailed article from The Christian Science Monitor, Pete Spotts wrote that this antimatter development is "akin to capturing lightning in a bottle," and something physicists have been trying to do for more than 20 years. The reasons why scientists have been trying to do this remain elusive and terrifying even to a comics blogger like myself, but Spotss summarized the principles of the matter (heh):

Like a hydrogen atom, which consists of an electron orbiting a single proton, antihydrogen is made up of two particles – a positron and an antiprotons, the antimatter counterparts to electrons and protons.

The particles are virtually identical in every way, except for two properties, one of which is their electrical charge. An electron carries a negative electrical charge, while the positron carries a positive charge. A proton carries a positive charge, while an antiproton carries a negative charge.

Positrons and antiprotons form in a range of processes in the cosmos. For instance, positrons form as a byproduct of collisions between cosmic rays and matter in clouds of dust and gas between stars.

But they trend to vanish quickly; when matter and antimatter meet, they annihilate each other in a sudden release of energy.

This imbalance of matter and antimatter has created confusion in the scientific community, where the conventional wisdom is that the Big Bang would have created matter and antimatter in equal amounts. Obviously, what scientists have yet to discover (because they are a load of n00bz) is that when the Third World died and in its wake were born the two opposing planets, New Genesis and Apokalips, a number of Apokaliptian New Gods -- most notably Orion and Big Barda -- abandoned the evil lord Darkseid and his pursuit of the Anti-Life Equation in favor of a Source-reverent life on New Genesis, which would easily account for the imbalance in matter and antimatter in the Universe.

[Via Rick Veitch]