Good News, Hobos!!! Here's Some Free Drugs For Your Penis!!!

The poors may not be able to get their hands on Chantix or Combivir, but now they can sex some sluts real good, gratis:


Pfizer Inc. is unveiling a new program Thursday that will let people who have lost their jobs and health insurance keep taking some widely prescribed Pfizer medications — including Lipitor and Viagra — for free for up to a year.

The world's biggest drugmaker will provide more than 70 of its prescription drugs at no cost to unemployed, uninsured Americans, regardless of their prior income, who lost jobs since Jan. 1 and have been on the Pfizer drug for three months or more.

The announcement comes amid massive job losses caused by the recession and a campaign in Washington to rein in health care costs and extend coverage. The move could earn Pfizer some goodwill in that debate after long being a target of critics of drug industry prices and sales practices.

..."There's a long-term benefit there, beyond the goodwill and the publicity," said David Heupel, health care portfolio manager at Thrivent Large Cap Growth Fund. "Pfizer is trying to maintain their (market) share, if not grow their share" by keeping people from switching to generic versions of its drugs to save money.

"If you're already taking medication that's working, typically doctors don't push to change it," Heupel said.

Pfizer's program comes at a time when many drugmakers, including Pfizer, have been raising prices on their drugs, partly to offset declines in revenue as the global recession reduces the number of prescriptions people can afford to fill.

The idea for the program came just five weeks ago, at a leadership training meeting, as the workers discussed how many patients are struggling, Puente said.

"It was my idea," he said. "I floated it, and the reception it got was so dramatic that it very quickly became our idea."


via MSNBC

Maybe You Should Consider Becoming a Muslin

Hey everybody. Some Chinese science slut says we're all gonna die.

Stock up on duct tape the windows and bottled water. Elohim is coming back to our Earths...and he's pissed:


World Health Organization director-general Dr. Margaret Chan raised the pandemic threat awareness level to 5 out of 6 on Wednesday, meaning the world is at imminent risk of a pandemic from H1N1 swine flu.

"I have decided to raise the level of influenza pandemic alert from phase 4 to phase 5," Chan told a news briefing.


via Reuters

Hand Your Babies Over, Please. President Obama Is Hungry

That didn't take long at all. Barack the baby eater reversed Bush era bans on stem cell research.

Who can blame him? Infants are considered a fine delicacy in some cultures:

President Barack Obama Monday rescinded the Bush administration’s limits on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research and chided his predecessor for putting politics ahead of science.

Obama also signed an order meant to put scientific research back in the forefront in government decision-making.

“It is about ensuring that scientific data is never distorted or concealed to serve a political agenda — and that we make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology,” Obama said.


Another bright side? Ingredients for embryonic egg sardou will be dirt cheap.

No One Wants To Play Doctor With America

That's right. No universal health care and no sexy surgeon general for you.

CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta officially withdrew his name for the post Thursday, citing family reasons or some other shit that's just an excuse for not wanting to make less money:

This is more about my family and my surgical career," Gupta told CNN's "Larry King Live."

The neurosurgeon said he would likely have had to give up practicing had he taken the job as the nation's top doctor.

In addition, the 39-year-old and his wife are expecting their third daughter any time, and the government job would have meant long periods away from his family, he said.

"I think, for me, it really came down to a sense of timing more than anything else," he said. "I just didn't feel I should do that now."


Further, it seems that Vermont anger bear Howard Dean has no interest in the post either:

The news that Sanjay Gupta has decided not to go for the gig of surgeon general has already fired up supporters of Howard Dean, who are now touting him for the post.

But a close Dean ally familiar with his thinking tells me that it’s not really a gig that would work for him. “It’s not a good fit for him,” this ally tells me.

A few months back there was a round of chatter about Dean getting tapped as surgeon general, but at the time Dean aides shot down the speculation. “Even then we didn’t think it was right for him,” the Dean ally says.


Basically, the only candidates left are Dr. Nick and that guy who fertilized the freak in California with her own mini-cult.

Enjoy your diseases and lack of condoms, America!

Good News: Our Ancestors Never Fucked Neanderthals

What's your excuse?

Here's some sciency stuff:

If ancient homo sapiens got it on with their Neanderthal cousins, there were no children to show for it. Researchers studying Neanderthal DNA have sequenced half of the Neanderthal genome, and shoot down the theory that European humans interbred with the now-extinct species. And the team says the genome has other things to teach us about Neanderthal life, including their sexual proclivities.

...Earlier comparisons of mitochondrial similarly cast doubt on the Neanderthal interbreeding theory, but recent research has revealed that Neanderthals do not possess the very genes some researchers believed modern humans had received from Neanderthals. Neanderthals possess neither the microcephalin gene, linked to bulging brains in humans, nor humans’ increased fertility gene.

Here Kitty Kitty

Scientists have unraveled how a horse tranquilizer and hallucinogenic night club drug known as "Special K" can ease depression, researchers said on Friday.

Ketamine, which can also cause feelings of detachment, could pave the way for new treatments for people suffering from depression, the researchers added.

Their study, published in the Archives of General Psychiatry, found ketamine restores to normal the orbifrontal cortex, an area of the brain located above the eyes that is overactive in depressed people.

The area is believed to be responsible for feelings of guilt, dread, apprehension and physical reactions such as a racing heart, said Bill Deakin, who led the study.

"The study results have given us a completely novel way of treating depression and a new avenue of understanding depression," said Deakin, a neuroscientist at the University of Manchester.

Depression is a leading cause of suicide and affects about 121 million people worldwide, according to the World Health Organisation.

via Reuters

When Galaxies Collide

From Wired:

To celebrate the 18th anniversary of the launch of Hubble, the Space Telescope Science Institute released 59 images of galaxies colliding. Rather than the staid and immutable image that galaxies have had in textbooks these images paint a remarkable picture of whirling, colliding, flirtatious galaxies that are crashing into each other or cozying up to produce new mega galaxies.

Although only one in a million of the galaxies closest to us are interacting, galaxies much further away (the light we are getting from them is billions of years old) are caught "in the act" more often. This is because there were more galactic collisions in the early universe, so looking farther away (which is also farther into the past) will increase your chances of seeing galaxies collide.

And The World Just Gets Scarier Day By Day

Proving that street cameras and wire tapping aren't the only angle that the powers that be can use to monitor and control our every move, Scotland Yard (which apparently is not a rugby field) wants to get all sciencey and take DNA samples from troubled students:

The director of Scotland Yard's forensics division says that Britain should be collecting DNA samples from any primary school children who show signs of behavior that exhibit a propensity for later crimes, according to an article in the Observer.

The Yard's Gary Pugh says the idea that trivial offenses committed early in life can forecast more serious crimes later in life is supported by studies, and that identifying these individuals when they're children would not only aid crime-solving later, but possibly deter some of these suspects from committing crimes when they're adults.

'If we have a primary means of identifying people before they offend, then in the long-term the benefits of targeting younger people are extremely large,' said Pugh. 'You could argue the younger the better. Criminologists say some people will grow out of crime; others won't. We have to find who are possibly going to be the biggest threat to society.'

Pugh admitted that the deeply controversial suggestion raised issues of parental consent, potential stigmatisation and the role of teachers in identifying future offenders, but said society needed an open, mature discussion on how best to tackle crime before it took place.

Listen. You assholes whip up a cure for Cancer, or figure out how to make my teevee stop buzzing every time my phone is about to ring...then we'll talk.

Until then, fuck off.

via Wired

Sci-Fi Inspiration

From io9:

Some of the most awesome science fiction machines ever conceived for film, like the turbo-tank AT-ATs from Empire Strikes Back, were inspired by things the concept designers saw every day. You may already know that George Lucas was allegedly inspired to create the AT-ATs by these cargo lifters at the Port of Oakland -- but did you know the T-1000 "liquid metal" Terminator was inspired by chocolate fudge? Find out which strangely ordinary items inspired eight of the coolest science fiction machines, and be humbled.

via io9

Home School Science Fair

February has been the unofficial Science Fair Month here at brickbat. Keeping with that tradition, we bring you the winner of the 2008 Home School Science Fair:

...The blue-ribbon winning project on dinosaurs and people roaming the earth together, with the color photos and the perfectly cut lettering, probably had parental help. The one explaining how a broken motor disproves Darwin's theory of evolution, with the roughly cut pieces of paper and the penciled in chicken scratches, probably did not.

2nd place went to a thesis entitled "All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Sunday School."

via boingboing

Heather Has Two Mommies, And A Dad

io9 reports:

In three to five years, a baby will be born with two genetic mothers and one father. This could prove to be a boon for polyamorous families of the future who want to have children with more than two parents. A team of British researchers working with embryos have now perfected the three-parent babymaking technique.

The technique is actually designed to prevent certain genetic diseases associated with the mother's mitochondrial DNA (a small amount of DNA that lives outside the cell nucleus). One woman contributes her nuclear DNA, one contributes mitochondrial DNA, and the father contributes the typical chunk of his own nuclear DNA. Presto: a baby with three genetic parents.

That noise you hear is the collective screaming of Fundamentalists.

via io9