A publicist for the family reissued a statement Tuesday thanking fans, friends and family for their support and asked for continued prayers.

The 25-year-old was performing a flip Thursday when he clipped the top of a jump and went over the handlebars. The snowmobile rolled over him, but he walked off the course with help and went to a hospital with a concussion.

While there, he developed bleeding around his heart and was flown to Grand Junction for surgery Friday. His family said Sunday that Moore then had a secondary complication involving his brain. They didn't provide details.

Moore's younger brother, Colten, also crashed in the competition and suffered a separated pelvis.

Australian climatologists have published a study that compared results from five global research groups, each of which used different modeling approaches to develop future wave-climate scenarios.

Their : "We find an agreed projected decrease in annual mean significant wave height over 25.8% of the global ocean area." Translation, as succinctly put by , "Surfing is going to suck for a quarter of the world."

Spanish doctor Eufemiano Fuentes, the central figure in the trial, was given a one-year prison term for endangering public health on Tuesday.

The case attracted international attention because of the high-profile of some of his clients in Spain and beyond and his claim early in the trial that he treated a host of athletes in sports other than cycling.

However, the judge prompted widespread disbelief and condemnation when she also ordered the evidence, including code-named bags of blood, to be destroyed, rejecting a request for access from anti-doping authorities and dashing hopes that others involved in illegal activity could be identified.

She justified her decision by saying that evidence collected in a criminal investigation could not then be used in an administrative process such as a doping probe by a sporting body as it would infringe the rights of those implicated.

Spain's anti-doping agency (AEA) has said it will appeal, raising the prospect of the case, which has already lasted more than seven years since the initial police raids, dragging on towards September when the decision on the 2020 Games is due.

"The bid will be affected by both the good and the bad but we cannot be made responsible now for Operation Puerto," Blanco, who is also the president of Spain's Olympic Committee (COE), said in an interview with As sports daily published on Friday.

"We cannot correct the past but we can the future and that is our concrete commitment, nobody can doubt that," he added.

"The problem is that Operation Puerto has been a mistake and a disaster for Spanish sport from the start.

"The legal process has a timescale that is not the same as that in sport, where you have to decide things immediately.

"Now there will be appeals and the case will continue to drag on. It has been seven years already and that's a whole career for many athletes."

OTHER SPORTS

The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) also voiced its disappointment with the judge's decision to destroy the evidence and said it is considering an appeal.

WADA, the AEA, the Spanish cycling federation (RFEC), the International Cycling Union (UCI) and the Italian Olympic Committee (CONI) were all represented in the three-month trial in Madrid.

Fuentes, who denied doping, said in his opening testimony that he had clients in cycling but also in sports including soccer, tennis, athletics and boxing.

He offered to name them in court but the judge ruled that would have infringed the rights of those implicated.

"The verdict does not help the country's image," secretary of state for sport Miguel Cardenal told As on Friday.

"We will continue to devote all our efforts to find out these names and we will continue to explain that the outcome of a trial is one thing and another is our commitment as a nation," he added.

"They need to see that we are in the same boat in the fight against doping and that we feel the same frustration and the same disappointment."

Spanish tennis player Rafa Nadal, the world number five, added his voice to the criticism of the verdict on Friday, saying "the only people who benefited were the cheats".

"With something that damages the image of sport so severely, the ones who are affected are us the Spanish athletes and sport in general," he told a promotional event in Madrid.

"I think the best thing that could happen is that we stop talking about the issue."

Madrid is competing with Istanbul and Tokyo for the 2020 Games and International Olympic Committee (IOC) members are due to vote on the bids at a meeting in Buenos Aires in September.

(Reporting by Iain Rogers, editing by Martyn Herman)

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A modest tax increase that Republicans embraced months ago will be part of President Barack Obama's budget proposal set for release next week, White House officials said on Friday.

The proposal would change how Social Security pension benefits are periodically adjusted for inflation and, in doing so, also change the adjustment of federal individual income tax brackets, resulting in slightly higher taxes for many Americans.

The idea - involving a measure of inflation known as the chained Consumer Price Index, or chained CPI - was backed in December by House of Representative Republican leaders. White House officials detailed it ahead of Wednesday's budget release.

Chained CPI is staunchly opposed by many Democrats as well as labor and retiree groups because it would reduce some Social Security benefits. By offering it in his budget as a concession, Obama could be trying to bring Republicans back to the deficit-reduction negotiating table in coming weeks.

Republicans backed chained CPI as a way to raise $200 billion over a decade in an offer when the two sides were dueling over how to avert the $600 billion "fiscal cliff" mix of tax hikes and spending cuts that loomed at the start of the year.

House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner and other House Republican leaders signed a December 3 offer that proposed chained CPI. Boehner spokesman Brendan Buck said on Friday that the speaker is still open to such a move.

"There is a substantial bipartisan consensus that there's a more accurate measure of inflation," Buck said.

"And the Speaker has said if a measure is more accurate, it should be used wherever it is applied throughout government."

So where does the tax boost come in?

Switching to chained CPI from the CPI measure now used by Social Security would also change tax bracket adjustments so that they would occur less often. As a result, Americans with rising incomes would see more of their income move more quickly into higher tax brackets. This is known as "bracket creep."

"Chained CPI increases revenues because we adjust the tax code by that measurement of inflation," said Steve Bell, senior director of economic policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a think tank, and a former adviser to congressional Republicans.

BIPARTISAN IDEA

Many bipartisan deficit-cutting groups have proposed moving to chained CPI, including the so-called Simpson-Bowles commission and the Bipartisan Policy Center.

"I can't explain," how Republicans can back a tax hike, said Stephen Entin, an economist at the conservative Tax Foundation think tank and former Treasury official under President Ronald Reagan. "It is usually put forward as a technical adjustment, but it is also a tax increase."

Supporters of the switch say the standard CPI index overstates price rises, but opponents say moving to chained CPI would unfairly deprive older Americans of benefits they have been promised.

In addition, because more affluent taxpayers can't be bumped beyond the top bracket, the change would tend to bite hardest among middle-class taxpayers, according to the non-partisan Tax Policy Center.

About three-quarters of households would see a tax hike, TPC said in an analysis, with those making between $30,000 and $40,000 seeing the biggest cut in after-tax income - on average about 0.3 percent.

Obama's fiscal 2014 budget aims to cut the deficit by $1.8 trillion over 10 years, administration officials said.

Boehner, the top Republican in Congress, has ruled out any further revenue increases after letting taxes rise for the wealthiest Americans earlier this year.

(Additional reporting by Richard Cowan and Mark Felsenthal; Editing by Kevin Drawbaugh and Eric Walsh)

The familiar sandbag party that kicked off what city officials call "tuck it in weekend" began in 2009 when residents fought the first of three straight major floods. Students placed 700,000 sandbags in less than two days during the last flood in 2011. Officials and residents hope not nearly as many are needed this year.

The students sandbagged 134 homes throughout the city Friday and headed back to school after lunch was served by grateful residents such as Glenda Bro. About 40 students, mostly from Fargo North, laughed and sang as they tossed sandbags outside the home where Bro and her husband, a Fargo physician, have lived for 32 years.

Bro said it was a relief to have the sandbagging help, which she called "organized and calm." The singing helped.

"That's kind of contagious," Bro said. "Fear is contagious, and so is a happy spirit."

The city has reason to be optimistic.

The latest forecast calls for the Red River to reach a water level between 37 and 39 feet, down a foot from the previous crest range. Although the river begins to spill its banks at 18 feet, few structures are threatened until the water level goes above 38 feet, thanks primarily to increased flood protection efforts in recent years.

"The bottom line is we're in excellent shape to meet the crisis of 2013," said Dennis Walaker, Fargo mayor.

The river measured 21.7 feet at 2 p.m. Friday. Tim Mahoney, Fargo's deputy mayor, said the city would be buttoned up by the end of the weekend, then officials will monitor the river on an hourly basis.

"This weekend what we want to do is tuck it in, which means get all our dikes done, get all our sandbagging done, get everything done," Mahoney said. "And then we wait and watch."

Many students were happy to be outside on what was the first day where temperatures had reached into the 60s this year.

Fargo North student Ross Ashland, 17, also said he felt good about sandbagging because he was forced to evacuate his house during a record flood in 2009. He was also happy to be outside in a T-shirt for the "first time since winter started."

Another North student, Tristin Schoenwald, 16, said most of his classmate wanted to start sandbagging Thursday but weren't complaining about a lower river crest prediction.

"We're happy to help," he said. "The community has always been there for us. It's nice to return the favor."

One 13-year-old sandbagger, Brooke Peterson, is home-schooled student whose friend lives in the neighborhood.

"It's great to help. I love it," she said. "It's a great workout and I'm getting fresh air."

City worker Jim Mohr, who directed sandbag placement behind the Bro home, said the students were extremely coachable.

"They get it down pretty quickly," Mohr said. "It's great to have them."

Although workers placed down plywood in an effort to limit damage to the neighborhoods, it wasn't an issue around Bro's house because it won't be around for long. Not too long ago, the city told her the house was low on the priority list for a buyout. But last Saturday, the city agreed to take it off their hands.

"That is an answered prayer because this house wouldn't sell," Bro said. "Nobody is going to buy a house on the river in Fargo."

___

Follow Dave Kolpack on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/davekolpackap .

Ben Zygier was arrested in January 2010 and held in secret under the name of Prisoner X on unspecified security charges. A judicial inquiry in Israel found Zygier, 34, hanged himself in a high-security jail cell.

Australian state television said Zygier unwittingly sabotaged a secret 2007 Mossad mission to exhume the bodies of three Israeli tank crewmen captured and killed by Syrian forces during Israel's invasion of Lebanon.

The television report quoted a former commander in Lebanon's Bekaa valley as saying that Zygier had revealed his name and that of a Lebanese agent for Israel to Lebanese intelligence.

Ziad al-Homsi, former mayor of a Lebanese village, told ABC television that he had been approached by Mossad in 2007 and flown to China on the pretext of attending a mayoral convention.

He was introduced to a Syrian man who said his brother in Europe was working to return the bodies of the three Israelis captured during the so-called Battle of Sultan Yacoub in the Bekaa Valley -- Israeli-U.S. citizen Zachary Baumel and his fellow Israeli crewmen Yehuda Katz and Zvi Feldman.

Al-Homsi told the ABC that he suspected he had been ensnared in a Mossad operation. He was eventually told by others involved that the missing men were buried in Lebanon.

"At the last meeting they informed me about the location of the corpses exactly. I had to find a way to get the bodies and keep them," al-Homsi said, though he was given no details on how the remains would be turned over to a separate Mossad team.

The mission failed, al-Homsi said, after he was arrested on May 16, 2009 by Lebanese special forces and later jailed for 15 years for spying for Mossad. He served three years.

Zygier's crime was to inadvertently reveal Al-Homsi's identity to a Lebanese man he was trying to turn into a double agent, but who worked for Lebanese intelligence, the ABC said.

FADING MOSSAD CAREER

Zygier, acting alone, was trying to trying to turn around a fading career with Mossad, to which he had been recruited in 2004 after taking Israeli citizenship in the mid-1990s.

Australia's Fairfax newspapers and Germany's Der Spiegel said in March that Zygier, the son of a prominent Melbourne Jewish family, had believed the man was close to Hezbollah militants.

The plan went wrong when Zygier tried to prove his credentials by giving up the name of al-Homsi and another Lebanese agent for Israel named Mustafa Ali Awadeh. His actions caused Israel to abandon the mission, the ABC said.

Israel has refused to disclose details of the case, refusing a request for information from Australia's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. The case has been the subject of gag orders in Israel.

Zygier was arrested by Israel's internal security service Shin Bet and later jailed at the high security Ayalon Prison, committing suicide in his cell later that year.

Israel's Justice Ministry said last month it would not press charges over the suicide, despite missteps by jail officials on the day of his death.

Zygier received "distressing news" from his wife hours before hanging himself, but the jailer overseeing surveillance video from the cell missed the moments leading up to his death.

The case was kept secret until February, when an Australian television expose uncovered it, sparking media debate about Zygier's intelligence role and the nature of his alleged crime.

(Reporting by Rob Taylor; Editing by Ron Popeski)

LONDON (Reuters) - Is nanomedicine the next big thing? A growing number of top drug companies seem to think so.

The ability to encapsulate potent drugs in tiny particles measuring billionths of a meter in diameter is opening up new options for super-accurate drug delivery, increasing precision hits at the site of disease with, hopefully, fewer side effects.

Three deals struck this year by privately held Bind Therapeutics, together worth nearly $1 billion if experiments are successful, highlight a new interest in using such tiny carriers to deliver drug payloads to specific locations in the body.

U.S.-based Bind is one of several biotechnology firms that are luring large pharmaceutical makers with a range of smart drug nanotechnologies, notably against cancer.

And nanomedicine is also being put to work in diagnosis, with tiny particles used to improve imaging in scanners, as well as rapidly detecting some serious infections.

In future, researchers hope to combine both treatment and diagnostics in a new approach dubbed "theranostics" that would allow doctors to monitor patients via their medicines.

After much hype but limited clinical success, scientists in the nanotechnology field finally see a turning point.

"We have been hearing about the promise of nanomedicine for a long time, but it is now really starting to move," said Dan Peer, who runs a nanomedicine laboratory at Tel Aviv University.

"There is a new level of confidence in this approach among the big pharmaceutical companies ... We will see more and more products in clinical testing over the next few years and I think that is very exciting."

Nanoparticles made of polymers, gold and even graphene - a newly-discovered form of carbon - are now in various stages of development. In cancer alone, 117 drugs are being assessed using nanoparticle formulations, though most have yet to be tried on patients, according to Thomson Reuters Pharma data.

Other potential applications include treatments for inflammatory disorders, heart and brain diseases, and pain.

COLLATERAL DAMAGE

Companies are increasingly focused on better drug targeting to increase efficacy and lessen the collateral damage caused by medicinal "carpet bombing" - a particular problem in cancer, where toxic compounds are needed to kill tumors.

The work on drug-carrying nanoparticles parallels advances in using so-called "armed antibodies" to deliver drugs direct to cancer cells - an approach championed by Roche.

The Swiss group won U.S. approval in February for Kadcyla, its first such antibody-drug conjugate, which treats breast cancer with fewer side effects like hair loss.

"All these developments have prompted companies to look at new avenues because the older ways of using drugs haven't worked so well," said Robert Langer, a pioneer of nanomedicine who runs the world's largest biomedical engineering laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Having worked on drug delivery since the 1970s, Langer has seen plenty of ups and downs.

The world's first nanomedicine was actually approved back in 1995 when U.S. regulators gave a green light to Doxil for treating Kaposi's sarcoma, a cancer often associated with AIDS.

Doxil - a hollow fatty ball known as a liposome with a cancer-killing drug inside it - was a breakthrough. Yet few other nanomedicines have followed.

Recent scientific advances have changed the game, however. Bind's nanoparticles, for example, are programmed to reach the right spot using targeting molecules that recognize specific proteins linked to disease on the surface of cells.

They also have a stealth covering that shields them from the immune system, in order to minimize adverse reactions.

Since January, Amgen, Pfizer and AstraZeneca have all signed up to use Bind's technology, which comes from work originally carried out in Langer's lab.

And Bind is not the only game in town. Another approach, using tiny particles of gold as drug carriers, is being explored in a deal that AstraZeneca signed in December with CytImmune.

"Anything you can do to improve targeting of tumors rather than normal tissue - whether that is through an armed antibody or nanoparticle approach - increases the chance of success," said Susan Galbraith, who leads AstraZeneca's oncology research.

PARALLEL APPROACHES

The work remains early stage and Peer of Tel Aviv University says all the novel carriers will have to be studied closely for potential toxicity. However, experience with liposomes is good and versions of gold nanoparticles have also been used safely for many years to treat rheumatoid arthritis.

Injecting patients with gold may sound like a pricey option but with thousands of nanoparticles fitting into the width of a human hair, the amount of metal used is tiny. Gold, unlike some other metals, is not toxic and has been used in various medical treatments for many years without harmful effects.

Bind CEO Scott Minick also thinks his polymer technology will have cost advantages over expensive antibody drugs.

Further out, Kostas Kostarelos, professor of nanomedicine at University College London, has high hopes for graphene - a one-atom-thick form of carbon. His team is currently working with graphene nanomaterials in pre-clinical experiments.

"We will see parallel development of different materials, each offering something different therapeutically," he said.

Other venture-backed nanomedicine firms include Cerulean Pharma, whose technology has made a highly potent cancer drug tolerable but which recently had disappointing results in a clinical study, and two companies looking at new vaccines.

Selecta Biosciences has a deal on food allergy vaccines with Sanofi, while Liquidia Technologies is allied with GlaxoSmithKline on vaccines and inhaled products.

MIT's Langer is convinced more Big Pharma companies will think small in future.

"You can be sure others will jump on the bandwagon sooner or later. That doesn't mean they might not jump off for a little bit too - but they will jump back on. These technologies are here to stay," he said.

(Editing by Peter Graff)

CHICAGO (Reuters) - An influential U.S. panel is calling for HIV screening for all Americans aged 15 to 65, regardless of whether they are considered to be at high risk, a change that may help lift some of the stigma associated with HIV testing.

The new guidelines from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF), a government-backed panel of doctors and scientists, now align with longstanding recommendations by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for testing of all adults aged 15 to 65, regardless of their risk.

Guidelines issued by the USPSTF in 2005 had recommended HIV screening for high-risk individuals.

Experts said the change, published on Monday in the Annals of Internal Medicine, will likely trigger coverage for the tests as a preventive service under the Affordable Care Act. Under President Barack Obama's healthcare law, insurers are required to cover preventive services that are recommended by the task force.

Currently, the healthcare law recommends coverage of HIV testing for adolescents and adults who are at high risk of infection.

"That was based on the 2005 USPSTF recommendations," Dr. Jeffrey Lennox, a professor of medicine at Emory University School of Medicine and chief of infectious disease at Grady Memorial Hospital, an inner-city hospital in Atlanta.

"Now, hopefully they will go back and recategorize that and recommend that it will be covered for every adult."

Joanne Peters, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, said the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force ranks preventive services based on the strength of the scientific evidence documenting their benefits.

"Preventive services with a 'grade' of A or B will be covered under these rules. This includes today's HIV screening recommendations," Peters said.

For doctors, the new recommendations should help clear up any confusion about testing among some primary-care doctors who have not been offering the test to all their adult patients. "Now, everybody agrees it should be done," Lennox said.

Task force member Dr. Douglas Owens, a medical professor at Stanford University, said, "We do hope the fact that the guidelines are all very similar will provide an impetus for people to offer screening because it is a very critical public-health problem."

50,000 NEW INFECTIONS A YEAR

Despite strides in reducing cases of HIV infection in the United States in the past three decades, as many as 50,000 Americans become infected with the virus each year.

The CDC estimates that almost 1.2 million people in the United States are infected with HIV, yet 20 percent to 25 percent of them do not know it.

"The Task Force's new recommendations will expand the number of Americans who know their HIV status and can take action to protect themselves and their partners," Dr. Jonathan Mermin, director of the CDC's Division of HIV/AIDS Prevention, said in a statement.

The recommendations are based on evidence showing the benefits and risks of testing and treatment for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Recent studies have shown that HIV treatment can reduce transmission of the virus to an uninfected partner by as much as 96 percent but there is no cure for the disease.

The group also recommends that teens younger than 15 and adults older than 65 should be screened if they are at increased risk for HIV infection. And it recommends that all pregnant women - including those in labor - who do not know their HIV status should be tested.

The guidelines call for screening at least once for all adults, and it recommends periodic screening for individuals at higher risk of infection. But it does not specify how frequently people at high risk for infection should be tested.

High-risk groups include those who have sex with gay or bisexual men, illicit drug users and economically disadvantaged populations in which HIV rates are high.

Owens said testing all adults within a certain age range may help reduce any stigma associated with testing and encourage people to get tested.

According to the CDC, stigma has been a major stumbling block that keeps many from seeking out testing, and the hope is that the change will make HIV testing a common part of medical care.

"CDC believes HIV testing should be as routine as a cholesterol test or a blood pressure check - but so far fewer than half of Americans have ever been tested," Mermin said.

As with the CDC recommendations, the USPSTF guidelines recommend that all individuals be offered the test as well as a chance to opt out of testing.

Lennox and others said it is too early to say whether the new guidelines will result in a significant increase in the number of tests, but the potential for insurance coverage may help.

Dr. Gerald Schochetman, senior director, infectious diseases and diagnostic research for Abbott Laboratories' Abbott Diagnostics, which makes an HIV test, said the task force recommendation will put more emphasis on the need for all adults in the United States to be tested and should encourage more doctors to discuss the need for testing with their patients.

(Reporting by Julie Steenhuysen; Editing by Douglas Royalty and Lisa Shumaker)

Instead of paintbrushes, she uses $10 million jet engines from a Learjet to hurl blues and purples with a force that creates intense power and heat.

"The timing of the velocity and the heat and the paint and so many other conditions is what creates art," she told The Associated Press on Tuesday from a tarmac in West Palm Beach.

Von Anhalt began creating such one-of-a-kind and pricey artwork in 2006 after studying the work of her mentor and late husband, Prinz Jurgen von Anhalt of Germany, who is credited with creating this type of artwork about three decades ago.

In a tight black Lara Croft-inspired pant suit, Princess von Anhalt grabs plastic bottles and jars of paint as she slowly makes her way across the tarmac to the blank canvas as planes take off nearby. With a small jet parked about two car-lengths away, she stands close enough to the canvas to touch it.

Von Anhalt then raises her empty hand to motion for the pilot to speed up the engine, and the splattering begins.

Hurled into the air at a ferocious velocity, paint collides with canvas and slowly drips in different directions in Florida's humidity.

The power of the engine and the heat of the creative process, Von Anhalt said, are addictive.

"When I'm in the midst of the creation, I don't think of the force," she said. "I don't think of the danger. I don't think of the heat. I'm caught up in the moment. It's addicting and you don't want to stop."

Flexjet, a private jet services company, partnered with the Jet Art Group to create different artworks to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Learjet.

Von Anhalt has created about three dozen pieces so far, but declined to say how much her paintings go for.

"It's a passion like a hurricane, like a tornado," she said. "And the more that the color gets laid down, the more I can see and predict what the painting is going to be." Other times, she admitted, she is surprised to see which direction the paint goes in the wind. "That's the emotion. It's an addiction. And how do you describe that? It's better than anything else."

___

Follow Suzette Laboy on Twitter: (at)SuzetteLaboy

NEW YORK (TheWrap.com) - Ask a group of pro wrestling fans to name their favorite lord of the ring and you might get 10 different answers.

Older fans grew up idolizing Hulk Hogan, Andre the Giant and "Nature Boy" Ric Flair while newer fans might list Shawn Michaels, Stone Cold Steve Austin and John Cena.

Yet ask those same people to pick their favorite wrestler-turned-movie star and the decision gets a whole lot easier.

There's only one choice.

Dwayne Johnson, better known as The Rock, has starred in three movies over the past three months, "Snitch," "G.I Joe: Retaliation" and "Pain & Gain," and each film was the top new release at the box office its opening weekend.

His next movie, "Fast & Furious 6," will have to face down "The Hangover Part III" and "Epic" to keep that streak alive, but no one questions whether it will be a hit. Every film in the franchise has been, and early projections suggest the only question is whether it will hit $500 million, $750 million or $1 billion worldwide.

Johnson is currently in the midst of a streak unheard of not only in the history of former wrestlers but also other athletes who tried to cross over into the film business. Hogan, Cena, Shaq and even O.J. Simpson made a few movies, but none of them became a bona fide movie star. (Note: One sage reader pointed out that we forgot about Olympic swimming gold medalists Johnny Weissmuller and Buster Crabbe, who became "Tarzan" and "Flash Gordon," respectively. How could we forget Weissmuller's yell?)

"Everyone sitting in my chair is trying to work with Dwayne," Jeff Kirschenbaum, co-president of production at Universal, which has released five movies starring Johnson, told TheWrap. "I don't think he's having a moment. This isn't his 15 seconds of fame. He now has enough experience and craftsmanship that it's going to be a long run."

While this isn't the first time Johnson has been atop the box office, this is his first uninterrupted string of hits. His early films ranged from financially successful ("The Scorpion King," "The Game Plan," "The Tooth Fairy") to disappointing ("Doom," "The Rundown").

"I don't know that no one took him seriously because of wrestling, but he's the only person who has ever truly emerged out of that," an individual close to Johnson, who declined to be identified, told TheWrap.

So how did this happen? How did a former football player and member of the inimitable Rock 'n' Sock Connection became one of the most successful actors working today?

It starts with protein.

"He wakes up at 4 a.m. just so he can eat protein," Kirschenbaum, skinny as the Rock is broad, said. "He goes back to bed for an hour and at 5 a.m. he works out - when most people aren't even awake. He woke up an hour early just so the protein is already there to build muscle."

Johnson's morning routine has become a Hollywood legend, alongside Sean Penn's partying and Amanda Bynes' drunk driving.

Ask anyone who's worked with Johnson why he has succeeded where others have failed and they jump to tell a story about those pre-dawn workouts. It's what Ric Roman Waugh, who directed Johnson in "Snitch," dubbed the actor's "sweat equity."

"A lot of people can say 'we worked hard and can stay up late'," Waugh said. "But if they could only understand the amount of stuff he's putting into one day, it's astounding. The sky could be falling in his world, but in that moment you need him to focus, he's 100 percent with you."

That workload has only increased over the past two years. Since resurrecting his wrestling career in 2012, Johnson has expanded his film and TV work. Not only is he starring in several movies this year, but he just produced his first film, "Snitch," and is about to host a competition show on TNT, "The Hero."

When he first decided to try his hand at acting, Johnson retired from the WWE at the height of his popularity. Yet his specific wrestling personality explains why Johnson found his way in Hollywood where the likes of Hogan and Cena did not.

Like most any other wrestler, he can use his hands or a two-by-four to destroy someone. He demonstrated as much in early films like "The Scorpion King," where he played a mercenary, and "Walking Tall," where he played a veteran eager to rid his town of corruption.

Kirschenbaum described those early performances as "raw," and those early characters as two-dimensional. That is where the career path of most former pro wrestlers both started and stopped.

"Most wrestlers have been straight-forward characters or amped up versions of the real individual," Adi Shankar, producer of "The Grey" and an avid wrestling fan, told TheWrap. "Hulk Hogan acted in a bunch of B-movies playing Hulk Hogan."

Instead, Johnson and his representatives experimented from the get-go, taking roles most wrestlers would not want to touch.

He played the straight man next to Sean William Scott in "The Rundown," which also called for him to get dry humped by a gaggle of baboons.

He then played a gay bodyguard in "Be Cool," and later entered the family area with "Tooth Fairy" and "Journey 2." All of his hits in 2013 feature action scenes, but "Snitch" is an adult drama and "Pain & Gain" is as quirky as a Michael Bay movie comes.

"Most action stars out there would never ever break their brand," Waugh, a former stunt man, said. "They would read a script and see a scene where they get beat down and say the guy has to punch me at least 10 times and hit me with a bat 14 times. Dwayne is completely fearless."

Unlike most of his peers, Johnson's popularity in wrestling was never predicated on physical prowess or intimidation.

"Stone Cold would get over because he'd beat everyone up. Shawn Michaels was one of the greatest wrestlers of all time. Mick Foley would just do crazy stuff," Shankar said. "The Rock got over because he was funny. You take humor out of the Rock and you don't have anything."

Shankar can remember when he first fell in love with The Rock. The Undertaker, one of the largest, most intimidating wrestlers in the WWE, had just battered and bruised the former football player. At the next event, The Rock came out and challenged him.

"He said 'Undertaker, you think you impress The Rock with your Mickey Mouse tattoos?' He acted like the Undertaker's goal in life was to come out and impress The Rock," Shankar recalled. "He wasn't a heavyweight champion at this point - just a guy coming up. The Undertaker had been around for a decade."

He was a showman first and a wrestler second.

"No matter how bad the show was, The Rock could cut a promo and save it," Shankhar said. "He could get on the mic and speak for three minutes and save a bad show."

Some claim the same now applies to poorly received films, with some dubbing Johnson franchise Viagra. Did your last sequel fail? Hire Johnson.

Some, like Waugh, love this term. Yet many chafe against the idea that Johnson saved their movies, believing it disrespectful to the previous success of the franchises he joined.

Whether Viagra or a supporting hand, there is one thing all directors and studio executives can agree on.

"My biggest concern on my next movie is that he's not in it,"Waugh said.