Nearly 1,000 delegates, 40 percent of whom live outside the United States, are present at the General Conference, which happens once every four years. At each assembly for more than 40 years now, the UMC has debated its position on homosexuality. The conference, which takes place between April 24 and May 4, announced that this year there are more than 70 petitions on homosexuality, many of which seek to rewrite articles 161F and 161B in the 2008 United Methodist Book of Discipline that address homosexual clergy and same-sex marriage.

The debate on those issues is centered on a decades-long drop in membership the Methodist church has experienced, with numbers down to 7.8 million members in the U.S. Gay rights activists have suggested that in order to attract young Americans, the church needs to loosen its stance on homosexuality and recognize gay unions and clergy. Conservatives, however, are warning against abandoning or revising long-held church doctrines.

Last year, almost 1,200 Methodist clergy pledged to perform same-sex marriage ceremonies despite official church teachings, but many of those churches have since split from the UMC. An even greater split is evident at the General Conference, the Houston Chronicle claimed - in attendance are delegates from U.S. states where homosexual marriage is legal, as well as representatives from countries like Liberia, where practicing homosexuality is considered a crime.

A suggestion of a compromise has been argued by some delegates who believe that Methodist attitudes toward gay marriage should reflect the locality of each church - meaning that pastors who live in states where same-sex marriage is legal should be free to perform such marriages, while clergy in other states should adhere to official teachings of the church.

According to Dr. Robert Jones, PRRI's CEO and one of the study's lead researchers, this group is changing the way Americans view and practice religion. "Basically all the varieties of Christian religion are in negative territories," said Jones, adding that Catholics and white mainline Protestants saw the largest losses away from childhood religious identification.

"In my own personal experience dealing with other millennials my age, there's a lot of those kinds of stories of 'Well, I was raised like this, but I am now this, or I'm not religious at all,'" she said. "There's a lot of shifting, and people don't tend to be as committed to one strict set of doctrines or dogmas, even if they might be spiritual still."

Clauhs, a religion major at Boston University, was raised by a southern Baptist father and a Roman Catholic mother. "I actually identify as Unitarian Universalist now," she said, explaining with a chuckle that "you're allowed to believe what you want."

Only 23 percent of the survey's respondents said they believe the Bible is the word of God and should be taken literally. And while 76 percent agreed with the statement that Christianity "has good values and principals," more than six in ten said the way the faith is practiced today is "judgmental" and "anti-gay."

But Jones said results do suggest millennials are seeking spirituality, albeit with less commitment than "the traditional structured church experience."

The new sensor preserves the same authentication performance as existing technology while halving thickness of current models. This also enables easy deployment to mobile devices, such as tablets and slate PCs, which are becoming increasingly slimmer, and helps to expand the range of applications for palm vein authentication. More customers will now be able to perform secure authentication using simple operations.

In recent years, to prevent damage caused by information leaks and identity fraud at companies and financial institutions, biometric authentication technologies, which leverage a user's biological information, have become prevalent as a means to verify an individual's identity.

Fujitsu Laboratories has developed a biometric authentication technology based on the vein patterns in a user's palm. This approach has a number of advantages that are unique even among biometric authentication technologies, including high authentication accuracy and the measurement of data from inside of the body, which makes it difficult to falsify.

The technology has been commercialized by Fujitsu as a non-contact palm vein authentication system called PalmSecure, which is used, for instance, by banks to authenticate customers, for computer log-in, and in room-entry/exit management systems.

Fujitsu Laboratories will continue R&D into the commercialization of ultra-small palm vein authentication, while aiming to quickly bring to market miniature devices that employ them.