dre in the morning

Senate pushes toward passage of health bill
Jubilant Democrats are ready to push President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul past one last 60-vote hurdle to final Christmas Eve passage, and Republicans concede they’re powerless to stop it. (yahoo)

‘Legal high’ clubbing drugs banned in UK
The substances, including GBL and BZP, become Class C drugs, with a possible two-year jail sentence for possession. (bbc)

Sorry, Vegans: Brussels Sprouts Like to Live, Too
“Plants are not static or silly,” said Monika Hilker of the Institute of Biology at the Free University of Berlin. “They respond to tactile cues, they recognize different wavelengths of light, they listen to chemical signals, they can even talk” through chemical signals. Touch, sight, hearing, speech. “These are sensory modalities and abilities we normally think of as only being in animals,” Dr. Hilker said. (nytimes)

The Inevitable Move Of iTunes To The Cloud
Apple undoutbedly spends a lot of money now serving music and movies over iTunes, but it’s for the most part a one-time deal, where a user pays and then downloads the content. If you introduce streaming into the mix, costs will go up. But perhaps that is part of the reason behind Apple’s new massive 500,000 sqaure foot datacenter in North Carolina — which will be one of the largest in the world. (techcrunch)

The proper way to use Photoshop
30 Fotografias Manipuladas Geniais! (dementia)

PARALLAX VIEW: The Incredible Montage
A DVD debut of a stunning piece of cinema. (dvdtalk)

Aerosmith singer Steven Tyler back in rehab
Tyler, 61, said in a statement that he was receiving treatment at an undisclosed facility for pain management and an addiction to prescription painkillers resulting from 10 years of performance injuries. (newsdaily)

Accept Defeat: The Neuroscience of Screwing Up
The reason we’re so resistant to anomalous information — the real reason researchers automatically assume that every unexpected result is a stupid mistake — is rooted in the way the human brain works. Over the past few decades, psychologists have dismantled the myth of objectivity. The fact is, we carefully edit our reality, searching for evidence that confirms what we already believe. Although we pretend we’re empiricists — our views dictated by nothing but the facts — we’re actually blinkered, especially when it comes to information that contradicts our theories. The problem with science, then, isn’t that most experiments fail — it’s that most failures are ignored. (wired)

The Conflicted Existence of a Female Porn Writer
Lynsey G. has taken odd writing jobs where she could get them for a few years now, and one day woke up to realize that they were all about sex. (mcsweeneys)

What The Insides Of A Typical R2 Unit Looks Like
Om nom nom nom. (epicwinftw)

Girl, Interrupted: The Life & Death Of Brittany Murphy
It’s something we’ve watched in progress throughout this entire decade: young women who are held up as the next big thing (Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears) and then brushed aside or openly mocked after they no longer fit an expected mold. It is both a story of self-destruction and mass-destruction, the business of creating and destroying a star; sometimes it’s caused by internal forces, and sometimes it’s fed by the rest of the world. (jezebel)

Democrats’ health bill passes key Senate vote
Dramatic defeat for GOP puts legislation on track for passage this week. (msnbc)

Familiar faces among health industry lobbyists
Many of them used to work in the Capitol as aides or as lawmakers themselves. (latimes)

Poland police question men over stolen Auschwitz sign
The five suspects, aged in their 20s and 30s, were not members of a neo-Nazi group, Krakow police said. (bbc)

The Love of Lust
The so-called sexual revolution has created a generation of braggarts who love to flaunt their sexual prowess. Flip the coin, and what you see is a society of men and women anxious not to be seen as sexual have-nots. (open)

The Fembot Mystique
Sex-and-tech writer Annalee Newitz explores the pop-culture fascination with female robots. (popsci)

Who is really smarter, dogs or cats
A dog really is man’s best friend claims a new scientific study that shows that canines make better pets than their arch rivals cats. (timeidol)

Bad Santa: Gifts that say you’re old, fat or hairy
Self-improvement surprises are best never to give nor receive. (msnbc)

Majority of U.S. Cocaine Supply Cut with Veterinary Deworming Drug
Cocaine’s a hell of a drug, and even more so when laced with another drug that’s commonly used to deworm opossums. Federal agents have found that 69 percent of cocaine shipments seized entering the United States contain levamisole, a veterinary drug linked to serious weakening of the immune system in humans. Here’s the real funny part: no one knows why. (popsci)

Susan Atkins, Manson Follower, Dies
Susan Atkins, a follower of cult leader Charles Manson whose remorseless witness stand confession to killing pregnant actress Sharon Tate in 1969 shocked the world, has died. She was 61 and had been suffering from brain cancer. (nyt)

The Lie Machine
GOP operatives are running a secret campaign to kill health care reform, and it’s based on Karl Rove’s old playbook. (rolling stone)

Brits have had ‘indirect sex’ with 2.8 million people
The “Sex Degrees of Separation” ready reckoner tots up the numbers based on your number of partners, then their previous partners, and their former lovers, and so on for six “generations” of partners. (yahoo)

New tool to fight syphilis? Wal-Mart gift cards
During times of economic downturn, people are more likely to turn to unhealthy behaviors that contribute to the spread of syphilis, such as trading sex for money. (msnbc)

The story of how Detroit died
If Detroit had been savaged by a hurricane and submerged by a ravenous flood, we’d know a lot more about it. If drought and carelessness had spread brush fires across the city, we’d see it on the evening news every night. Earthquake, tornadoes, you name it — if natural disaster had devastated the city that was once the living proof of American prosperity, the rest of the country might take notice. (time)

Warning: this unrealistic image has been Photoshopped
The French parliament has held its first hearing of a proposed law that would require every advertisement to display a disclaimer telling the public that images of people were manipulated. The goal is to help cut down on body issues in adolescents, and violating the law could be costly. (ars technica)

Million to one apple is half red, half green
Fruit grower Ken Morrish was left stunned when he found a golden delicious apple on his tree split exactly half green, half red down the middle. (telegraph)

Dutchman Flips Tractor Trailer While Masturbating, Doesn’t Stop
A high-on-drugs Dutch trucker en route to Gothenburg, Sweden, was masturbating while driving and lost control, flipping the truck and blocking multiple lanes of traffic. While in the wreckage, he kept masturbating. Under police interrogation, he kept masturbating. That’s determination. (jalopnik)

Future is TV-shaped, says Intel
By 2015 more than 12 billion devices will be capable of connecting to 500 billion hours of TV and video content, says chip giant Intel. (bbc)

Spaced: Ten Year Anniversary
The ground-breaking, hugely influential and enormously funny sitcom that launched the careers of Edgar Wright (who directed), Simon Pegg (who co-wrote and starred), Jessica Hynes (who did the same) and Nick Frost (who made his acting debut as the deranged Mike) – is ten years old. (empire)

Exclusive New Interview with David Lynch
Brand new interview with the one and only David Lynch. Topics include his films (of course), smoking, Transcendental Meditation, and his daily quota of 15 cups of coffee. (viceland)

No Signal
A montage of cellphones in horror movies. (youtube via metafilter)

From the guys who made “Forrest Gump, In 1 minute in 1 take”; Here’s “28 Days Later, In 1minute in 1 take”.
(youtube.com)

The 25 Best SNL Commercial Parodies Of All Time
With “Saturday Night Live” premiering its 35th season this weekend, we’re counting down some of their funniest moments, including their best digital shorts, and most fabulous presidential impressions. But the true highlight of “SNL” has always been its fake commercials, which have offered everything from edible floorwax to edible energy drinks. Unfortunately, three of our favorites (Nikey Turkey, Compulsion by Calvin Klein, and Steve Martin’s All-Natural Penis Beauty Cream) are not available online, but the rest are here! (huffingtonpost)

Conrad Murray, Jackson personal physician proscribed the anesthetic, commonly used as an animal tranquilizer, for insomnia. Now it looks like Dr. Feelgood might be facing homicide charges.

There are reports that the coroner has concluded Jackson’s death was homicide.

The reports, carried by the Associated Press news agency quoting unnamed police sources, have not been confirmed.

But the BBC’s Rajesh Mirchandani in Los Angeles says homicide includes manslaughter, and investigators have been trying to establish if there is a case for that charge.

Details of the Los Angeles County coroners’ findings were revealed when a search warrant affidavit was made public in Houston, Texas, where Dr Murray has offices. (bbc)

Murray recorded a youtube video earlier this month, claiming his innocence, and thanking his supporters. But a quick search only turned up this spoof.

Never heard of Propofol? Me neither. Evidently it’s a powerful hypnotic that’s used primarily as an anesthetic.

Propofol is unrelated to the barbiturates, and has largely replaced sodium thiopental (Pentothal) for induction of anesthesia as recovery from propofol is more rapid and ‘clear’ as compared to thiopental.

Propofol for intravenous administration is a white liquid; due to its appearance and amnestic effects, it is jocularly called “milk of amnesia” by medical professionals. Propofol is also commonly used in veterinary medicine.

According to a search warrant issued by Los Angeles County on July 17, 2009, Jackson’s personal physician administered 25 milligrams of propofol diluted with lidocaine shortly before his death.

One of propofol’s most frequent side effects is pain on injection, especially in smaller veins. This pain can be mitigated by pretreatment with lidocaine. (wikipedia)

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