Switzerland - Astrophysicists at Switzerland's CERN Institute have replicated anti-matter warheads first debuted on a Star Trek episode in 1966.
A report on the Beeb TV news channel broadcast an excerpt on Monday night showing Captain Jim Kirk ordering the firing of Photon torpedoes against some pesky Klingons.
The news story then confirmed CERN had managed to stabilise its own anti-matter warheads 'for almost 17 minutes' in a breakthrough mimicking alien plot lines from the sci-fi spoof movie Galaxy Quest.
The 1999 film - about a group of human actors contacted by an advanced alien species called Thermians to help defend them against an alien warlord - is a well-known Star Trek parody.
Millions of UK TV viewers saw the Beeb broadcast hailing the creation of antimatter - the ultimate holy grail of particle physics - despite the absence of any discernible CERN footage.
"We broadcast bits of the landmark Star Trek episode showcasing Scotty's cleverly improvised gamma ray blasters because of its populist credibility," Beeb news editors commented today.
"It seemed a good idea at the time."
Hopefully the UK TV coverage will not have been intercepted in deep space by The Borg, notorious alien assimilators of lowly sub-species across the universe.
A Big Bang update will follow shortly.
