Well, the normal product of mixing significant quantities of matter and antimatter together is that the two annihilate each other in a big explosion of energy. Or warp speed (beam us up, Scotty!). Yet scientists in CERN have actually combined the two to produce an unstable "hybrid" matter called protonium, as reported in the Physical Review Letters journal and NewScientist.com.

The the funny thing is, they did this back in 2002, but they didn't realize it until recently.

Protonium is composed of protons and anti-protons (protons which have a negative charge as opposed to positive). It is also produced in particle accelerator experiments, though in amounts too small to study. The 2002 CERN experiment, on the other hand, involved a chemical reaction that was intended to create antihydrogen (the antimatter form of hydrogen). Protonium was found to be an unintended - and relatively plentiful - byproduct of the process.

The scientists believe that the formation probability of protonium using that method "is very high", and they would like to create more of it to advance the study of particle physics. On the other hand, because it is so unstable, protonium usually lasts for but a very few microseconds before disappearing in a puff of annihilation energy.