Climate change advocacy groups are not happy with U.S. Climate Envoy Todd Stern's recent statement at Dartmouth College renouncing a limit of 2 degree celsius (2C) temperature rise as a global goal for UN climate negotiations. Stern said that agreeing to a framework to achieve the 2C goal would "only lead to deadlock" and that a new agreement should give countries "flexibility." 

The U.S. Department of Justice announced that Gibson Guitar Corp. entered into a criminal enforcement agreement resolving a criminal investigation into allegations that the company violated the Lacey Act by illegally purchasing and importing ebony wood from Madagascar and rosewood and ebony from India. 

Pyros small tactical munition completed a successful warhead and guidance system test, according to Raytheon.

There are three choices for guiding the weapon to the target: GPS coordinates, inertial navigation or laser designation.   There are also three options for engaging the target: height-of-burst, point-of-impact or fuze-delay detonation. The end-to-end test validated the weapon's guidance modes (semi-active laser and global positioning system), its height-of-burst sensor, electronic safe and arm device, and multi-effects warhead.

Medieval clerics did not like the prospect of giving up sex - heck, every man getting getting married dreads the part about giving up sex  - so even when they had to do so by Papal decree there was resistance to it. You think changing from a Latin to local language Mass was controversial? Genitalia are a lot more personal. 

Priests, of course, used to be married but that changed hundreds of years later after the foundation of Christianity. The justifications were that a priest should imitate Christ, who was celibate (unmarried), and still later there was an argument and decree that priests who were handling the sacraments had to also be unpolluted by sexual activity - chaste.

The Carnival of Cosmology: Bloggers on Dark Energy is now up and running on Matthew R. Francis' Galileo's Pendulum:

In the spirit of blog carnivals, several of us—cosmologists, physicists, astronomers, and writers who just love all these subjects—decided to write about one of the abiding mysteries of modern cosmology. That mystery is dark energy, the name we give to the accelerated expansion of the Universe.

In 2008, “The missing memristor found” [1] was published in the respected science journal Nature, and this claimed discovery was announced on the front pages of most major newspapers. This “discovery” is simply a misinterpretation of devices that had been discovered many years before in India [2,3]. Those original inventors did not misinterpret their work in order to make it into the news. Given the serious doubts that have been presented in many places, one seriously wonders whether the fact that the cheated are ‘just a bunch of Indians in India’ has anything to do with the embarrassing situation of that most science media and bloggers do not care.

Fainting, also called vasovagal syncope (by about five neurologists and no one else), is a brief loss of consciousness that occurs when blood flow to the brain drops.  Its causes are so numerous that it is basically unknown what causes it - everything from dehydration to medications to pregnancy, heart conditions and age - but these triggers all occur among people who have a strong genetic predisposition, according to new research.

Does gaydar exist?  If so, it's in the eyes.

Sexual orientation can be revealed by pupil dilation to attractive people, say researchers who used a specialized infrared lens to measure pupillary changes of participants watching erotic videos. Pupils were pretty accurate: they widened most to videos of people who participants found attractive, thereby revealing where they were on the sexual spectrum from heterosexual to homosexual.

Conventional motion capture for film, like Gollum in the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, and game production ("Mass Effect 3") involves multiple cameras and actors festooned with markers but the future of motion capture may look much different.

A new technique not only captures the 3D poses of actors, like with traditional motion capture systems, but derives "biped controllers", which are programs that incorporate the underlying physics of the motion. Bipedal controllers generate the poses by computing the forces acting on the body and integrating them over time.