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Our tally of strange new worlds just reached 5,000. Astronomers have added the 5,000th alien world to the NASA Exoplanet Archive, officials with the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California announced on Monday (March 21). The milestone comes amid a surge of recent discoveries and the promise of more insights to come, as NASA’s $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope readies for planet-gazing operations in deep space. “The 5,000-plus planets found so far include small, rocky worlds like Earth, gas giants many times larger than Jupiter, and ‘hot Jupiters’ in scorchingly close orbits around their stars,” JPL officials said in Monday’s statement....

Originally posted on the Nature news blog The National Science Foundation (NSF) has a new leader. The Senate voted today to confirm astrophysicist France Córdova to lead the agency, roughly a year after former director Subra Suresh resigned mid-term. Córdova was most recently the chairwoman of the Smithsonian Institution’s Board of Regents, which oversees the sprawling Washington DC-based museum complex, and a member of the National Science Board, the panel that oversees NSF....

Birds are the only dinosaurs that have survived into modern times. Why is that? Of all the dinosaur species, how did they manage to make it through the catastrophic events of 65 million years ago, whereas all their fellow dinos perished? A new study, published May 27 in Nature, hints at an evolutionary phenomenon that may have played to birds’ advantage: They are, it seems, baby dinosaurs whose biology prevents them from ever growing up....

Oh dear—π day 2016 has gone by and I still haven’t memorized p in what I used to call the ‘‘elementary’’ way that I invented some decades ago. Somebody recently suggested the much better name ‘‘Chemical π.’’ What can I do to make sure I do it by next π day? I know— I’ll write an article called ‘‘Chemical π’’ for The Mathematical Intelligencer. Here goes: Let me tell you how Chemical π starts....

U.S. EPA’s Clean Power Plan does far more than the draft proposal to support states pursuing carbon trading, offering a “panoply” of tools, in the rule’s words. States can still choose to write plans to direct individual carbon-cutting actions, from burning more natural gas to building renewable power. Or they can tell power plants to meet emissions rates—to reduce the amount of carbon they emit with each unit of energy they produce—or buy credits to make up for the difference....

In approximately five billion years, as the sun expands into a red giant star roughly the diameter of Earth’s orbit around it, our galaxy will collide with its nearest large neighbor, Andromeda. As gravity draws the pair toward each other for a close encounter, stars will be ripped from their orbits to make spectacular tails, and gas and dust will be squeezed toward the approaching nuclei, destroying the stately, grand spirals that have existed for almost three quarters of the age of the universe....

More than one in five dams in the Himalayas are likely to experience overwhelming floods caused by the failure of rock embankments that impound glacier-fed lakes, according to the first systematic analysis of current and planned hydropower projects in the region. With few downstream sites left, hydropower dams are rapidly spreading up Himalayan valleys, closer and closer to rivers’ headwaters, to meet rising electricity demand. Improvements in transportation and communication in otherwise remote and inaccessible regions have facilitated the expansion, which put more projects within reach of so-called glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs)....

Asia, a white-cheeked gibbon living in a Virginia zoo, is the first of the long-armed, tree-swinging apes to have its genome decoded. Her DNA sequence, and those of seven other gibbons — a total of six different species — help to explain how these apes adapted to life in the trees. They also may explain why gibbons are so diverse compared with the great apes — humans, chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans....

For the first four years of her childhood, Vanessa Brunetta’s family was homeless. Later, her family was rocked by domestic violence to the point that “my older brother and I would spend most nights at a neighbor’s house or locking ourselves in our room,” she says. By age eight, she’d been placed in foster care; in that first year, she was shuffled through four different foster homes. By high school the number had grown to eight....

The classic Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” may have a new meaning. Scientists announced they have likely discovered the strongest, stiffest diamond-based nanomaterial to date. Its properties suggest it could have important industrial applications, such as in transportation or aerospace manufacturing, and it might revive the idea of building elevators to space. A team led by chemist John Badding of Pennsylvania State University took an approach reminiscent of the way Superman squeezed coal into diamond in comic books....

REDMOND, WASH. —Microsoft threw open the doors to its worldwide research laboratories earlier this week at its seventh annual TechFest event, an information technology expo during which the world’s largest software maker offers reporters and scientists a peek into its high-tech crystal ball. The more than 35 technology projects on display at the company’s campus included its far-out virtual WorldWide Telescope (WWT), software that is helping the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Ocean Observatories Initiative cull data from deep-sea sensors as well as programs designed to make solitary Internet searches a thing of the past....

Astronomers have made the first reliable measurement of a supermassive black hole’s spin, showcasing a technique that could help unravel the mysteries of these monsters’ growth and evolution. The enormous black hole at the center of the spiral galaxy NGC 1365 is spinning about 84 percent as fast as Einstein’s general theory of relativity allows it to, researchers determined. The find demonstrates that at least some supermassive black holes are rotating rapidly — a claim previous studies had hinted at but failed to confirm....

Late one moonlit night, three fictional revelers on an English moor were transfixed by a horrific sight: “a foul thing, a great, black beast, shaped like a hound, yet larger than any hound that ever mortal eye has rested upon. And even as they looked the thing tore the throat out of Hugo Baskerville, on which, as it turned its eyes and dripping jaws upon them, the three shrieked with fear and rode for dear life....

Ever green: Pine trees, which can grow for thousands of years, are the oldest living trees. But scientists are learning that palms can be even older—at least at the cellular level. A recent American Journal of Botany paper explains that conventional trees experience a secondary growth phase—replacing functional tissues with younger cells—but palm trees do not. The individual cells in a palm, seen in this micrograph of the genus Veitchia, endure throughout the tree’s life span, which can range from 100 to 740 years....

The modern supermarket produce aisle is full of visual illusions. The strawberries are plump and glistening; the tomatoes smooth-skinned and lustrous; the melons firm and brightly colored—yet all too often devoid of flavor. We have no one to blame for these bland beauties but ourselves. By selectively breeding crops to be as prodigious as possible and to survive weeks of shipping and storage in dark, cool conditions, we have sapped flavor, aroma and nutrition from our food....

In the span of a few days in the spring of 1999, hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians fled their homes in Kosovo as Serbian forces drove them into neighboring countries. At the time, I was a new medical school graduate put in charge of triaging sick and injured refugees who showed up in a constant stream at an improvised medical aid station in the cold, muddy no-man’s-land between Kosovo and Macedonia....

Sharks have remained relatively unchanged by evolution for 400 million years, but shark science has evolved significantly in just the past few decades. In 1987 when Discovery Channel’s now-famous Shark Week series debuted, researchers had few means of studying the animals beyond underwater cages and crude acoustic tracking devices. Twenty-three years later, marine biologists studying elasmobranch (the subclass of cartilaginous fishes that include sharks, skates and rays) animals employ satellite tracking, genetic analysis and high-definition cameras to broaden their knowledge of shark biology and behavior....

Despite advances in forensic techniques, criminal investigations still rely on age-old tools such as eyewitness testimony, which can be biased and unreliable. But what if we could take advantage of other human abilities, such as sense of smell or a talent for facial recognition? Researchers are exploring that possibility and other crime-fighting techniques that rely less on human judgment and more on big data crunching such as an algorithm that predicts an offender’s risk of committing another crime....

By Alex Dobuzinskis LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A wind-driven brush fire burning out of control in a drought-parched Southern California wildland on Wednesday threatened a wealthy community in the foothills of the San Bernardino Mountains and forced the evacuation of hundreds of residents, officials said. The fast-moving blaze, which sent smoke billowing down the foothills toward large suburban houses, comes amid a dangerous combination of unseasonably hot weather and fierce Santa Ana winds that put much of Southern California’s brushy hillsides at risk of fire....

More than 500 million years ago a set of specialized enzymes and proteins evolved to defend our primitive ancestors against assaults from the outside world. If a microbe breached the shell of some Cambrian-era fauna, the members of this early-vintage immune system would stage a savage but coordinated attack on these interlopers—punching holes in cell walls, spitting out chemical toxins, or simply swallowing and digesting the enemy whole. Once the invaders were dispatched, the immune battalion would start to heal damaged cells, or if the attacked cells were too badly damaged it would put them to rest....