This crazy old mossy mudball upon which we stubbornly cling and insist on calling “Earth” (because calling it “Dirt” would be declasse’)has spun on its axis seven times since the last time I emptied my bucket of science news jewels into your lap, milady, and so it must be time to do the whole thing all over again.

So here I am, your classically competent collator of cromulent contributions to the Knowledge of Humanity, once more sifting the sands of science for your very own personal benefit.

And what the hell, I will even share my thoughts on each item too. You lucky stiffs!

First up : scientists have discovered the blackest planet ever.

No racial message here, it is just plain literally the blackest planet ever observed, absorbing nearly all of the light that falls on it. It’s blacker than coal. It’s blacker than flat matte black paint. It’s just plain really, really, really black.

And at the center of this Jupiter-sized exoplanet of ultimate blackness, in the shadow of the blackest heart of the blackest planet around the darkest star ever, you find this guy.

And if you find him…. and if your skin is lighter than burned toast, you won’t…. but if you find him there, you will find him…. angry.

Admittedly, it’s debatable how important finding the blackest planet ever seen will turn out to be to science in general or astrophysics in particular. It will be interesting to speculate on what the heck it’s made of to make it so damn black, but really, the main interest is poetic, or aesthetic.

The idea of “the blackest planet ever” just seems made for rampant science fiction fiddling. Maybe it’s a giant energy collector for some energy-hungry aliens who live at the center and who need every single bit of energy that strikes the surface of the planet just to survive.

Maybe it’s the central temple of some void-worshiping energy beings who use it both for all their important religious ceremonies and for the execution of their worst criminals, who are tossed into That Which Eats All.

Or maybe it’s just the Locknar. Or that evil planet thingy from Fifth Element.

And the science fiction fodder just keeps coming, because the big news from NASA’s family of researchers is that we seem to have found some DNA from space in a sample from a meteoroid.

Caution is the watchword with a story like this, both because of the potential colossal hugeness of the find and the potential for a false positive due to external contamination.

I mean, this is Earth, we got DNA all over the damn place, from the microbes in the air to the whales in the sea and everything in between. You can’t get away from the stuff!

And, you know, you’re full of it too. DNA, I mean.

And we are not, alas, talking about a full double helix from some alien creature, only awaiting the right combination of genetic science and complete ignorance of science fiction B-movie plots to be brought to life before us.

Instead, it’s more like bits of chemicals that could become DNA. There’s two of the four DNA “letters” plus some other DNA-ish junk. But the important thing is that it proves that pre-life type chemistry in floating space rocks.

This would bolster the panspermia hypothesis, which posits that life on Earth might have actually gotten its start from materials that fell to Earth from space. A comet, a meteor, the glowing substance from a Happy Fun Ball, something like that.

One more item to round out the troika…. hmmm, I had it somewhere here…… there was one more, I am sure of it…. oh right, here it is. Rich people are evil.

Or at least, significantly more evil than the average person. Less empathetic, less altruistic, less compassionate, less caring. All the attributes traditionally associated with morality the world over are things they lack, or actively reject.

I have been saying for a while that wealth infantalizes. The richer someone becomes, especially when they reach the point of decadence where interpersonal relationships are replacing with dictatorial relationship and the ability to identify with your fellow humans becomes less and less necessary. The ability to have whatever you want, whenever you want it, spoils adults just as surely as it does children. In fact, it does it faster, because the person is basically spoiling themselves. And just like with children, it makes them selfish, impatient, quick to anger, rude, dismissive, and just plain unpleasant.

It makes them, in fact, infants. They get everything they want via crying in anger, they are cranky and fussy, they refuse to take care of themselves and make others do it, they are demanding and impossible to please because they basically want a return to the womb, where everything is provided for them without them even having to ask.

And infants, of course, lack empathy. They are sociopaths, because they do not even have a sense of people as valid beings, just as means to satisfying their desires.

And because they are so firmly stuck in the decadence trap, they are often deeply unhappy people who lash out against the world, blaming their inability to be happy with their wealth on others. And they see the world entirely in a self-based morality. Anything they don’t like is evil and bad and mean and done just to hurt them. There can never be any possible moral justification for doing the slightest thing that displeases them. That, in their infantile moral language, is a program that just does not compute.

And in our broken world, they have more political power than everyone else, and want the world turned into their personal playpen, ground down into a never-ending bottle of pablum for their greedy guts, and anything else is just plain wrong.

So…. um…. science.

Science is still cool. Right?