So what is antimatter? Well, in the beginning of the universe there was matter and antimatter. Matter is what we and everything around us is made of. Antimatter is the opposite of matter. If the two collide, they annihilate each other, producing large amounts of energy. 0.5 grams of antimatter + 0.5 grams of matter create an explosion as powerful as the atomic bomb that destroyed the city of Hiroshima in World War Two! This is because a matter and antimatter explosion is about 100% efficient at turning matter into energy, whereas an atomic bomb is only about 1% efficient.
So far so good, but if we are made of matter, then what happened to antimatter? Scientists claim that in the beginning of the universe, there was a tiny bit more matter than antimatter. So for every thousand antimatter and matter particles that destroyed each other, one matter particle survived. These surviving matter particles formed everything around us, including you and me.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3a1c_1TIGGw
Okay, if an explosion of antimatter and matter produces so much energy, why are we not using it to fuel power stations or build weapons? Well, there are some big problems. Problem number 1 is that we can only produce very small amounts of it. To be more precise, it would take billions of years to produce a few grams! The second problem is that it is very expensive to create much of it. It will cost you more than it will give you in return, for instance, you would have to pay one billion dollars worth of energy to make a microgram of antimatter, wich in gives you less than a billion dollars worth of energy in return.
Conclusion: antimatter is real, but it is not really dangerous to us, because we can produce so little of it. However, just imagine that this could happen if we had a gram (the weight of a paperclip) of the stuff:
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