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By Ari RabinovitchTEL AVIV (Reuters) - Israel plans to cut oil use in transportation by 60 percent by 2025, an aggressive target by world standards, and will tap into its newfound natural gas deposits to make it happen.It is also investing heavily to help start-ups developing battery and biofuel technologies, and is offering an annual $1 million prize to innovators in the field, almost on par with winning a Nobel.“The intent is to make Israel a power center that has knowledge and industry in the field, and from there to serve as a catalyst for the rest of the world in making the switch,” said Eyal Rosner, pointman for the project in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office....

EPA must produce the opposing body of science Administrator Scott Pruitt has relied upon to claim that humans are not the primary drivers of global warming, a federal judge has ruled. The EPA boss has so far resisted attempts to show the science backing up his claims. His critics say such evidence doesn’t exist, even as Pruitt has called for greater science transparency at the agency. Now, a court case may compel him to produce research that attempts to contradict the mountain of peer-reviewed studies collected by the world’s top science agencies over decades that show humans are warming the planet at an unprecedented pace through the burning of fossil fuels....

GIGLIO, Italy—The rotation of the crippled Costa Concordia cruise liner off the rocks of the Tuscan island of Giglio began at 9 A.M. today (September 16), three hours late due to a torrential overnight sea storm that halted preparations. The salvage crews had hoped to have the control room for the operation—a prefabricated container—in place on a barge less than 100 meters from the rusting hulk by first light. Instead, operators had to hustle to put the room into place when the rough seas calmed....

CANCUN, Mexico – Clumps of black, straw-like seaweed dot the beach at Boca Paila on the Yucatan Peninsula. Gnats swarm the deposits. Clumps of grass add to the difficulty of sunbathing in comfort. Marie Claire Paiz loves it. “At one point, Cancun was like this,” Paiz, a Guatemalan biologist who directs the Nature Conservancy’s Southern Mexico program said, her arms spread wide. Where tourists see nuisance, Paiz and local scientists see unspoiled nature doing its job....

Monster black holes shooting jets of gamma-ray radiation right at us have been spotted farther away than ever before, dating back to when the universe was nearly one-tenth its current age. The five distant objects, called gamma-ray blazars, deepen the mystery of how black holes so large could have formed so early in the universe’s history. Roopesh Ojha, an astronomer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, presented the new results during a press conference today (Jan....

A growing body of research has traced the roots of Alzheimer’s disease to the deposition of a protein called tau throughout the brain. To date, however, targeting the rogue protein to treat dementia has produced mixed results, with a promising anti-tau compound recently failing in a late-stage clinical trial. Yet a new study hints that a twist on this established strategy could yield better results. The findings, reported yesterday in Science Translational Medicine, suggest compounds called antisense oligonucleotides, or ASOs, may not only reduce levels of existing tau but also prevent its formation....

Nichole Broderick thought she knew how Bt toxin worked. After all, the toxic crystal produced by the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis has been known since at least 1911 and widely used as an organic insecticide since the 1950s. Scientists have even genetically engineered various crops to produce the pesticide. According to the accepted model, Bt toxin punches holes in an insect’s gut. These pores either allow the bacterium to infect the insect’s blood, the so-called hemolymph, or cause the insect to starve....

By William Mallard An earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 7.3 hit northern Japan on Tuesday, the Japan Meteorological Agency said, issuing tsunami advisories for much of the nation’s northern Pacific coast. The epicenter of the earthquake, which was felt in Tokyo, was off the coast of Fukushima prefecture at a depth of about 10 km (6 miles), the agency said. There were no immediate reports of damage or injury, which struck at 5:59 a....

INEQUALITY CONTROL Economist Joseph E. Stiglitz’s article (“A Rigged Economy” [The Science of Inequality]) on how we got to today’s lamentable economic state in the U.S. is spot on. Yet let me give my own, more simple explanation: When I was a young man, during the three decades after FDR and the New Deal, the maximum federal tax rate (applied at the time to income exceeding an amount that has ranged between $100,000 and $500,000) was between 70 and 91 percent....

The oldest chambered hearts have been discovered in fossils from Western Australia. The two-chambered organs, which date back about 380 million years, are preserved within remarkable three-dimensional fossils of ancient, armored fish called placoderms, which were the first vertebrates to develop jaws more than 400 million years ago. These jawed fish represent an evolutionary leap toward the body plan present in most animals with a backbone today—including humans. The fossils reveal that it didn’t take long for evolution to land on this basic body plan: At this point in evolutionary history, the S-shaped heart in the placoderms was already well separated from the other organs, lodged near the newly evolved jaw....

Last Friday the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced a pivot in its guidelines for indoor mask wearing that suggests that more than two thirds of Americans no longer need to wear masks—including children in schools. “We want to give people a break from things like mask wearing when our levels are low and then have the ability to reach for them again, should things get worse in the future,” said CDC Director Rochelle Walensky at a briefing with reporters....

From Lost Animals: Extinction and the Photographic Record, by Errol Fuller. Princeton University Press, 2014. Copyright 2013 © Errol Fuller We tend to think of extinction as a silent process, occurring somewhere far, far away and long, long ago, but the unfocused, unstructured, sepia and black-and-white photographs collected in Lost Animals force us to acknowledge the loss. These animals survived for thousands of years, long enough to enter the photographic age and to be captured on film....

By Byron Kaye SYDNEY, April 23 (Reuters) - Australia said on Thursday its new climate policy will pay A$13.95 a tonne for carbon in an effort to cut emissions, a price seen as too low to attract big polluters but enough for the government to call its first funding auction a success. The A$2.55 billion Emissions Reduction Fund was set up by Prime Minister Tony Abbott as a cheaper way to cut Australia’s carbon emissions by 5 percent of 2000 levels by 2020, after he scrapped a controversial A$8 billion carbon tax in July 2014....

When giant stars die, they don’t just fade away. Instead they collapse in on themselves, leaving behind a compressed stellar remnant, usually a city-sized, superdense ball of neutrons appropriately called a neutron star. In extreme cases, however, most theorists believe an expiring giant star will form a black hole—a pointlike “singularity” with effectively infinite density and a gravitational field so powerful that not even light, the fastest thing in the universe, can escape once falling in....

California’s 2017 wildfire season is poised to shatter records as the 155,000-acre Thomas Fire in Ventura County continued to grow over the weekend, placing it among the state’s 20 largest wildfires dating to the 1930s, according to a database maintained by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire). Two other large fires also continued to burn north of Los Angeles: the 15,600-acre Creek Fire consuming the western portion of the Angeles National Forest near San Fernando, and the more than 6,000-acre Rye Fire near Val Verde and the Interstate 5 corridor....

Is metacognition unique to humans? We cannot ask animals for a verbal judgment about their behavior, but ingenious animal-friendly tests can nonetheless probe whether other creatures form thoughts about their own thoughts. In a pioneering experiment, psychologist David Smith of the University at Buffalo trained a dolphin named Natua to swim toward one of two levers when he heard either a low- or high-pitched sound. When Natua answered correctly, he scored a fish....

Although this year hasn’t been too unusual, Maine lobsterman Steve Train has noticed several new species appearing in his nets over the past few years. Red hake is more common than it used to be in Casco Bay, he said, as well as sea bass and squid. Lobster is also showing up earlier than Independence Day, when he used to begin his yearly catch. “If you wait for the Fourth of July to get them now, you’re going to miss them,” Train said....

A feared “twindemic” of influenza and COVID never came to pass last year, but the outlook for such a confluence this winter is resurfacing similar concerns among epidemiologists and other infectious disease experts. Flu cases started to tick up in October and November, and those months saw an outbreak at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. These early signals suggest that, in the coming weeks, seasonal flu could wreak some havoc—especially in hospitals—simultaneously with the national surge of the novel coronavirus, or SARS-CoV-2....

THIS TIME OF YEAR is deadline season for many people. It seems that wherever we look, there is a clock or a calendar pressuring us to move faster and stop dawdling. For some it is the end-of-semester crush, with papers to write and books to digest and comprehend, whereas others are rushing to tidy up a hundred loose ends before that big family vacation. Whatever the precise reason, the lament is the same: so much to do, so little time!...

Every winter Mexico hosts a pair of extraordinary migrations. One, a round-trip of 3,000 miles, brings the gaudy monarch butterfly from the northern U.S. and southern Canada to its winter refuge in the south-central state of Michoacán. There shafts of morning sunlight pierce the forest as millions of silent visitors, each weighing less than a tenth of an ounce, cling to branches everywhere. Seven hundred miles to the northwest, the 36-ton gray whale completes the southward leg of a journey from Alaska’s Bering and Chukchi seas to lagoons along the central shores of the Baja California peninsula....