I’m recovering from chocolate poisoning and I hope you are too. Here are some left-over articles to fill your trick-or-treat bag the rest of the way to the top: Miniature labs are being designed and built to detect biowar agents and extraterrestrial life. Work to map the genes of the lab test plant Arabidopsis turned up no sign of that new super-sized “phat” version of DNA known as xDNA. (“We’ve designed a genetic system that’s completely new and unlike any living system on Earth,” said Eric T. Kool, a professor of chemistry at Stanford and co-author of the Science study. “Unlike natural DNA, our expanded molecule is fluorescent and is considerably more stable when subjected to higher temperatures.”) There are major new breakthroughs in custom man-made artificial proteins and molecular memory molecules, too.

Know what would be interesting? MRI brain scans of people reliving virtual reality car accidents or listening to the howl of the current solar storm as they used their physics degrees to produce new weapons like bunker buster nukes or arrowheads.

And just so you know, the official verb for what we do here on SciSCoop is “spraffing.”