For years, politicians wanting to block legislation on climate change have bolstered their arguments by pointing to the work of a handful of scientists who claim that greenhouse gases pose little risk to humanity.

One of the names they invoke most often is Wei-Hock Soon, known as Willie, a scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who claims that variations in the sun’s energy can largely explain recent global warming. He has often appeared on conservative news programs, testified before Congress and in state capitals, and starred at conferences of people who deny the risks of global warming.

But newly released documents show the extent to which Dr. Soon’s work has been tied to funding he received from corporate interests.

He has accepted more than $1.2 million in money from the fossil-fuel industry over the last decade while failing to disclose that conflict of interest in most of his scientific papers. At least 11 papers he has published since 2008 omitted such a disclosure, and in at least eight of those cases, he appears to have violated ethical guidelines of the journals that published his work.
[...]
The newly disclosed documents, plus additional documents compiled by Greenpeace over the last four years, show that at least $409,000 of Dr. Soon’s funding in the past decade came from Southern Company Services, a subsidiary of the Southern Company, based in Atlanta.

Southern is one of the largest utility holding companies in the country, with huge investments in coal-burning power plants. The company has spent heavily over many years to lobby against greenhouse-gas regulations in Washington. More recently, it has spent significant money to research ways to limit emissions.

“Southern Company funds a broad range of research on a number of topics that have potentially significant public-policy implications for our business,” said Jeannice M. Hall, a spokeswoman. The company declined to answer detailed questions about its funding of Dr. Soon’s research.

Dr. Soon also received at least $230,000 from the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation. (Mr. Koch’s fortune derives partly from oil refining.) However, other companies and industry groups that once supported Dr. Soon, including Exxon Mobil and the American Petroleum Institute, appear to have eliminated their grants to him in recent years.

As the oil-industry contributions fell, Dr. Soon started receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars through DonorsTrust, an organization based in Alexandria, Va., that accepts money from donors who wish to remain anonymous, then funnels it to various conservative causes.

David Moore has had enough of tight-fitting yoga pants.

The Montana state representative submitted a bill Tuesday that would strengthen the state’s indecent exposure law that would outlaw clothing, like yoga pants, that outline a person’s behind and genital region, the Billings Gazette reported.

House Bill 365 would also make nipple exposure, whether direct or as advertised as a result of tight fitting clothing, carry a first time offence penalty of a $500 fine. A second offence would bring a fine of $1,000 and the possibility of one year in jail.

For Moore, the legislation is long overdue.

“Yoga pants should be illegal in public anyway,” said Moore, who has also expressed a desire to spare the public from men’s Speedo-style swimsuits.

The inspiration for the bill appears to have been a naked bicycle event called Bare as you Dare, which took place in the state capitol last August.

Retired Missoula professor Walt Hill helped draft the bill.

“I want Montana to be known as a decent state where people can live within the security of laws and protect their children and associates from degrading and indecent practices,” Hill said Tuesday in support of the measure. “I believe this bill is written preserving that reputation.”

Giggly 12-year-old boys will no doubt be devastated, but the dirty double-entendre may be doomed on city-owned ball diamonds.

Goodbye, Master Batters, Morning Wood and The Blue Balls — your days could be numbered.

The same goes for any softball or slo-pitch team with a name deemed degrading, overtly sexual or encouraging domestic violence, in what some members of city council say is a badly-needed review of what is being allowed on public-owned property.

Most are just too raunchy for publication — but you can bet if a pre-teen boy would get a dirty laugh out of it, some team has used it.

“I’m not opposed to tongue in cheek, but some of this is disturbing — we need to get a handle on this, to ensure it’s not derogatory or disgusting,” said Coun. Evan Woolley, vice chair of the city’s Community and Protective Services committee.

“Some of this goes way beyond tongue in cheek.”

And that’s not even touching the really filthy stuff which, unless you’re an expert in perverse and puerile slang, probably requires online translation.

There’s Calgary slo-pitch teams using city facilities, with names lifted directly from an internet repository of revolting phrases and depraved sex acts.

The universe may have existed forever, according to a new model that applies quantum correction terms to complement Einstein's theory of general relativity. The model may also account for dark matter and dark energy, resolving multiple problems at once.

The widely accepted age of the universe, as estimated by general relativity, is 13.8 billion years. In the beginning, everything in existence is thought to have occupied a single infinitely dense point, or singularity. Only after this point began to expand in a "Big Bang" did the universe officially begin.

Although the Big Bang singularity arises directly and unavoidably from the mathematics of general relativity, some scientists see it as problematic because the math can explain only what happened immediately after—not at or before—the singularity.

"The Big Bang singularity is the most serious problem of general relativity because the laws of physics appear to break down there," Ahmed Farag Ali at Benha University and the Zewail City of Science and Technology, both in Egypt, told Phys.org.

Ali and coauthor Saurya Das at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, have shown in a paper published in Physics Letters B that the Big Bang singularity can be resolved by their new model in which the universe has no beginning and no end.