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 […]

Earth is crawling with lizards and snakes. More than 10,000 species of these reptiles, called squamates, have adapted to thrive across almost every continent. But this vast assortment took a surprisingly long time to develop, according to University of Bristol paleontologist Jorge Herrera-Flores and his colleagues. Instead of trying new adaptations as quickly as possible, […]