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Oil companies increasingly tout emissions reduction targets. But it’s often unclear how they plan to actually cut greenhouse gases. The Spanish oil giant Repsol SA offered some clues earlier this week when it unveiled its goal to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. The announcement itself was notable. While a growing number of companies have pledged to reduce greenhouse gases from their operations, none has committed to eliminating them, until now. The Madrid-based major said it planned to increase spending on renewables, tie 40% of executive compensation to emissions reductions and revamp industrial processes like refining so they release less carbon dioxide....

A Chinese-made vaccine has been given a stamp of approval by the World Health Organization (WHO) for the first time. The move could herald a step towards China becoming a global vaccine maker. The vaccine protects children against Japanese encephalitis (JE), a viral brain infection spread by mosquitoes that is common in parts of east and south Asia. The vaccine, formally known as SA 14-14-2, was added to the WHO’s prequalified medicines list last week, giving it a WHO quality and safety endorsement....

Crime doesn’t pay—except for when it does. The best way to make sure crime does pay is to not get caught, and a good way to not get caught is to not leave evidence. Dexter, the fictional TV serial killer, always wears gloves to make sure that the crime scenes, like the detectives, remain clueless. Yet thanks to a recent study, we now know Dexter might be able to render his fingerprints unreadable by practicing his knife skills on bags of onions....

The first results from a balloon-hoisted telescope that floated more than 20 miles (30 kilometers) above Antarctica have shed light on a major source of the celestial background, the electromagnetic radiation—both visible and invisible—that pervades the universe. The far-infrared background (FIRB), first detected in the mid-1990s by the now-defunct COBE (Cosmic Background Explorer) satellite, is voluminous if not luminous—its many photons have wavelengths much too long to be visible to the human eye....

The host nation for this year’s climate talks is pumping the brakes on one of its most successful ways of controlling carbon. France, one of the world’s leaders in low-emissions nuclear energy production, may soon diverge from the path that brought it there. The French get more than three-quarters of their electricity from nuclear power, the largest share of any country in the world. This atomic largesse from its 58 reactors—second only to the United States’ 100 reactors—has made France the largest net electricity exporter on Earth and provided cheap electricity to its residents....

By Jeff Tollefson of Nature magazineUS researchers have used computer modeling to identify an organic molecule with useful electrical properties - proof-of-concept for an approach that could soon yield new compounds to harvest solar energy in photovoltaic cells.Alán Aspuru-Guzik, a theoretical chemist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and his colleagues, used computational models to screen a family of organic molecules and identify those likely to be the best semiconductors. The team passed the finding to researchers at Stanford University in California, who have now synthesized the molecule and confirmed its properties....

Editor’s Note: This article is the second of a two-part Q&A (part 1 is here) in which filmmaker and aquanaut James Cameron discusses deep-ocean science with researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Cape Cod, Mass. In March Cameron announced the donation of his sub, DEEPSEA CHALLENGER, to Woods Hole , where scientists plan to use its cutting-edge technology to help further their understanding of life in the ocean’s trenches....

It wasn’t exactly smooth sailing, but The Planetary Society’s cubesat got the job done in the end. The tiny LightSail spacecraft overcame a battery problem—the second glitch it suffered after launching to Earth orbit last month—and deployed its solar sail on June 7, said representatives of The Planetary Society, a California-based nonprofit led by former TV “Science Guy” Bill Nye. “Sail deployment began at 3:47 p.m. EDT (19:47 UTC) off the coast of Baja California, Mexico, as the spacecraft traveled northwest to southeast,” The Planetary Society’s Jason Davis wrote in a mission update Sunday....

By Natasha GilbertSeemingly random attacks and a shadowy, mysterious enemy are the hallmarks of insurgent wars, such as those being fought in Afghanistan and Iraq. Many social scientists, as well as the military, hold that, like conventional civil wars, these conflicts can’t be understood without considering local factors such as geography and politics. But a mathematical model published today in Nature (see Nature 462,911-914; 2009) suggests that insurgencies have a common underlying pattern that may allow the timing of attacks and the number of casualties to be predicted....

“Magic numbers” of protons and neutrons can make an atomic nucleus exceptionally stable—and a new one has just been added to the existing menagerie that helps sketch a fuller picture of the complicated inner workings of atoms. By smashing beams of nuclei together at high speeds, researchers have discovered that when a calcium atom has 34 neutrons in its nucleus, things stay pretty quiet—at least for a few milliseconds. The discovery overturns some of scientists’ previous notions about magic numbers and opens up a new line of inquiry for nuclear physics....

By Reuters Staff WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama called on Wednesday for an end to psychiatric therapies that seek to change the sexual orientation of gay, lesbian and transgender youth, the White House said. The White House statement, written by senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, is in response to a petition calling for Obama to back a law to ban conversion therapy, which is supported by some socially conservative organizations and religious doctors....

In 1993, Natasha Alexenko was brutally raped, robbed and sodomized at gunpoint in her Manhattan apartment building. After her attacker fled, Alexenko fought the urge to take a hot shower, and immediately went to the emergency room to start the process of catching him. Her body was a crime scene. The then-20-year-old Alexenko was poked, prodded, swabbed and penetrated for an arduous four hours until she was stripped of countless samples that could potentially identify her assailant, and bring him to justice....

In 1998 British researcher Andrew Wakefield and his colleagues published a paper showing a link between the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine and the incidence of autism in children. During the following years the paper was exposed as an elaborate fraud and was retracted by the Lancet, the journal that published it. Dozens of follow-up studies have since shown zero connection between vaccines and autism. That paper, though thoroughly discredited, started a public panic (with celebrity backing) and resulted in tragic outcomes: record low vaccination rates among children, outbreaks of measles in theme parks, resurgences of diseases once considered rare....

As floodwaters from the swollen River Thames crept closer to the walls of Myles Allen’s south Oxford home in the United Kingdom, he was thinking about climate change—and if scientists could figure out if it was affecting the climbing water outside. It was January 2003, and as Allen—a climate expert at the University of Oxford—monitored the rising waters from the safety of his house, a voice on the radio was telling him that it couldn’t be done....

In many sports, mastery of the ball is crucial to success. But what happens if the ball disobeys the laws of physics? Researchers at the Sony Computer Science Laboratory and the University of Tokyo are working on just such a device: HoverBall. HoverBall is a 90-millimeter-wide quadcopter enclosed in a cage a bit bigger than a bocce ball. It is designed to hang in the air, change location and modify its behavior during play....

An estimated 20 million Americans take statins, making these cholesterol-lowering drugs the most widely prescribed class in the world. In coming years, these numbers are only expected to increase. In June 2011 the full patent for Pfizer’s blockbuster Lipitor (atorvastatin) will expire, making the drug significantly more affordable. And later this year the National Cholesterol Education Program (NCEP) of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute will release guidelines that could recommend stat­­ins for younger people who have no cholesterol issues—a move that could stave off cardiovascular disease later in life but also introduces questions about aggressively treating the healthy....

Oncology is leading the way in the development of personalized medicines. Over the past two decades, the field has started to move from chemotherapy and radiation to targeted monoclonal antibodies and, now, to therapies that activate a patient’s own immune system to fight cancer. According to a report by the industry group PhRMA, almost 250 immuno-oncology medicines and vaccines were in development in 2017. Advances in diagnostics have driven much of this progress....

Each year as Earth journeys around the sun, it slams into streams of particles that comets have spewed into space. When these particles, known as meteoroids, smash into the atmosphere, they generate streaks of light called meteors. The most reliable meteor showers—the Perseids in August and the Geminids in December—sport about 60 meteors an hour and require nothing more than a dark, moonless sky in order to appreciate them. Early last December, however, an uncharted meteoroid stream pelted the planet with one of the year’s strongest showers....

To virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier, nothing less than our culture and highest moral values are at stake thanks to the World Wide Web and certain destructive online behavior it facilitates. As evidence, he points out that during the 17 years since the Web took off, those who live off their brains—most writers, illustrators and musicians, for example—have experienced a worsening economic situation. In Lanier’s view, content originators are only the first to feel the pain—their plight eventually will afflict everyone in the middle class, hampering their ability to earn money....

[Editor’s Note: After a delay of more than a week, India’s Chandrayaan-2 lunar probe successfully lifted off on July 22 at 5:13 a.m. EDT (2:43 p.m. local Indian time.] A week after its launch was postponed, India’s uncrewed Chandrayaan-2 spacecraft is set to roar skyward in the early afternoon of July 22. It will take off from the Indian Space Research Organization’s (ISRO’s) Satish Dhawan Space Center, a facility on the barrier island of Sriharikota, off the coast of the eastern state of Andhra Pradesh....