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Tech giants aren't on the best terms with the Obama administration lately, with the NSA's surveillance revelations getting more widespread by the day. But a lot of big tech names have agreed to visit the White House for a chat. The White House just announced a who's who of tech leaders are coming to Washington tomorrow to meet with President Barack Obama and his team about the tech disaster that was HealthCare.gov, how government can better deliver IT and of course, national security.

According to the White House, here are the bigwigs expected to attend:

· Tim Cook, CEO, Apple

· Dick Costolo, CEO, Twitter

· Chad Dickerson, CEO, Etsy

· Reed Hastings, Co-Founder & CEO, Netflix

· Drew Houston, Founder & CEO, Dropbox

· Marissa Mayer, President and CEO, Yahoo!

· Burke Norton, Chief Legal Officer, Salesforce

· Mark Pincus, Founder, Chief Product Officer & Chairman, Zynga

· Shervin Pishevar, Co-Founder & Co-CEO, Sherpa Global

· Brian Roberts, Chairman & CEO, Comcast

· Erika Rottenberg, Vice President, General Counsel and Secretary, LinkedIn

· Sheryl Sandberg, COO, Facebook

· Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman, Google

· Brad Smith, Executive Vice President and General Counsel, Microsoft

· Randall Stephenson, Chairman & CEO, AT&T

No word on whether these tech leaders will do as cabinet members do for the State of the Union and have one group member stay back in case calamity strikes the room while they're all in it.

Writer-director Spike Jonze's latest movie, called simply Her, is about a lonely man who falls in love ... with his operating system. The two lovers — Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) and Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson) — never meet face to face. In fact Samantha has no face, not even an avatar.

Like Jonze's earlier films Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, Her is odd and ambitious. But despite the high concept, Jonze insists his movie is really just an old-fashioned love story. He spoke with NPR's Audie Cornish about the unique challenges of creating a film where one of the two main characters is just a voice, as well as about the wide range of reactions people have had to the story. And he pushed back at one of Cornish's questions about the movie's larger themes.

"This movie is, to me, so emotional," Jonze says. "When you're asking these questions that are more intellectual ... that's only half the story. And I think you're editing half of your reaction out."

There's no such thing as too much practice when it comes to brain surgery.

But it's hard for beginner neurosurgeons to get real hands-on experience. Most residents learn by watching and assisting experienced surgeons.

Newbies can practice on cadavers or use simulators, of course. But neither of those alternatives is quite the same as operating on a real, live patient, for better and for worse.

That's why 3-D printers might help the doctors do a better job. At the University of Malaya in Malaysia, neurosurgeons are using 3-D printers to make realistic skulls and brains that residents can use to hone their skills.

The models combine different materials to mimic the feel of human bone, membrane and tissue. Each practice patient is made to order from the scans of an actual patient, so students can try the same procedures they see senior surgeons perform.

Dr. Vicknes Waran, one of the neurosurgeons working on the project, says he prefers these 3-D models over cadavers for teaching.

"In some parts of the world, it's difficult to get cadavers," Waran tells Shots. Plus it's hard to find a cadaver with the types of tumors and illnesses that the residents are being trained to treat. The best part, Waran says, is that students can practice on the models as many times as they need to in order to completely master a technique.

Once an institution invests in a 3-D printer, Waran says these anatomical models are fairly cheap to make. The face and head cost around $2,000, but those parts are reusable. Each 3-D brain costs $600 to print and is usually only used once.

Waran and colleagues from the University of Oxford and the University of Portsmouth published a paper about this training technique in the Journal of Neurosurgery last week.

But they're not the only ones using 3-D printed models to train residents. At the University of Florida, neurosurgeons have combined a similar 3-D printed model with a visual simulator.

Kansas City residents are proud of their barbecue, their Chiefs football, their national champion soccer team and Boulevard Brewing, a local brewery that has built up quite a local following since its launch in the late 1980s.

"It's our thing. You know, like la cosa nostra, it's our thing," says Char O'Hara, a Kansas City, Mo., resident who, like thousands of other local 20-somethings, grew up with Boulevard.

But soon, it will be a Belgian thing, too. Any day now, Belgian beer maker Duvel is expected to finalize its purchase of the Kansas City brewery.

The deal to buy Boulevard Brewing says a lot about the transformation of the American craft beer industry — and just how much the world now values a product with a firm sense of place.

O'Hara is a little leery about Duvel taking over her brand. "These people came from the outside, and took something that's native to us, and it's kind of a bummer," she says. "It makes the future uncertain."

But John McDonald, Boulevard Brewing's founder, sees things differently. "I think a lot of people were kind of shocked at the news, and I kind of knew that would happen."

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