Editor's note: This story will appear in our January issue but is being posted early because of a publication in today's Nature.

Who says you need an advanced degree and a research grant to make breakthrough scientific discoveries? These basement scientists are making progress towards remarkable discoveries, from finding cancer treatments to locating new planets.

It sounds like something a villain might construct in a James Bond film: a laser, trained on a thin gold target, that churns out antimatter to annihilate ordinary matter. But scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have announced that they made just such a device, from which they were able to detect the production of more than a million positrons, the antimatter particle counterpart to electrons.

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Scientists for years have been scratching their heads over the cause of itching. There were theories that it shared a nerve pathway with pain to the brain – and now comes news that different forms of itching apparently have their own neural routes. The question is how to block their way. Sure there are some treatments like Benadryl and its ilk that  stop itching induced by histamines, biological compounds known to cause itching.

This is the fifth article in the Mind Matters series on the neuroscience behind visual illusions.

[The following is an exact transcript of this podcast.]

You might think these scientists were potty training this whale shark ...

Blow AwayA ramped-up version of the body’s cocaine-purging protein could lead to the world’s first effective medicine for combating overdoses and addictions to the illicit drug. The body can break down and inactivate cocaine with the natural blood protein butyrylcholinesterase, but this enzyme is normally too weak and ineffective for medical use. Now, with the aid of computer simulations to test molecules virtually, scientists at the University of Kentucky and their colleagues have developed a far more active form of this protein.

Scientists have managed to create quite possibly the most annoying robot ...

[The following is an exact transcript of this podcast.]