Star Trek: 10 Starfleet Rules You Never Knew Existed

In the Next Generation episode Night Terrors, there was a brief scene where Data and Deanna were looking through the ships database of available particles, when they came across an entry on antideuterium, a form of antimatter.

The entry explained that antideuterium was used as one of the main sources of fuel in the matter/antimatter reaction that powered the warp core, and it also included a reference to Starfleet Regulation 3287.0, which required all forms of antimatter to be stored in magnetic confinement pods.

This regulation is really interesting because it's actually quite realistic. In the real world, whenever matter and antimatter come in contact with each other they are both immediately annihilated and converted into pure energy. This property makes it very hard to study antimatter, since any container we would use to hold it would be made of normal matter and filled with air that would destroy any antiparticles we captured. CERN has been able to work through this by trapping antiparticles using magnetic fields in a near-perfect vacuum.

We always love to see examples of real-life science in Trek. It's really cool that they put so much thought into something as minor as storage guidelines.