By smashing particles together at close to light speed inside an atom smasher, scientists created a never-before-seen type of matter: an anti-hypertriton.

This particle is weird in many ways. First, it's not normal matter, but its eerie opposite, called antimatter, which annihilates whenever it comes into contact with regular mass. Second, the anti-hypertriton is what's called a "strange" particle, meaning it contains a rare building block called a strange quark, which isn't present in the protons and neutrons that make up regular atoms.

The experiment was conducted at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y. The results were announced in March 2010.

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