This message comes from the Center for U.S. Voters Abroad Foundation.

If you're a U.S. Citizen living abroad, the Center for U.S. Voters Abroad Turnout Project's online form

will walk you through requesting your ballot in just five minutes.

Visit International Voter.com.

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.

Everything you see in this world is made out of matter.

From the cells in your body, to the stars in the night sky,

to the street you walk on.

But matter has an opposite. It's called anti-matter.

And it almost sounds like something out of a comic book. You can think of them as like

superhero and villain. Jessica Escavell is an experimental particle physicist at FermiLab.

She says that to understand this ongoing superhero villain story you have to go

all the way back to the Big Bang.

About 13 billion years ago,

there should have been equal parts, matter,

and anti-atter created.

Jessica says that when a particle of matter and its antiparticle villain counterpart come into contact?

They annihilate in a blaze of glory. And that tiny amount of matter is what we're all made up of.

So if there are equal amounts of matter and antimatter once upon a time, then the mystery is,

why didn't they all cancel out and annihilate each other at the beginning of the universe?

Because remember, everything you see and touch is made of matter, which means a miniscule amount

of matter survived this huge war.

...