Rear View

Trade: Penn State professor cards
While he doesn’t hold the record for home runs in a season, and his slugging percentage can’t really be calculated, Dr. James Tumlinson still gets his own baseball card. Well, baseball might be a bit of a stretch, since he’s an entomologist at Penn State University, but he’s definitely on a card.
A black-and-white photo of the good doctor smiles on the card’s front behind big, blue block letters that spell TUMILNSON in an arc. White stars flank his field of study.

On the back, the card lists some of his stats: “As a chemist interested in biological and agricultural systems, TUMLINSON has studied chemicals that affect insect behavior, identifying pheromones and other semiochemicals, investigated the mechanisms by which chemical signals are produced and released by insects, and studied the behavioral responses of insects to chemical cues.”

The card is part of a set put together by the Penn State Alumni Association that promotes the school’s research faculty. It’s no Ted Williams, but it’s certainly a collector’s item.

Duck: Do-it-yourself rodent control
From the Rear View police blotter:
Around 1:20 a.m., the Mendocino County (Calif.) Sherriff’s Office responded to a call of an accidental shooting.

Deputies arrived to find a 43-year-old lying in the doorway of a trailer; a bullet had gone through her knee. A 42-year-old man was also there, with a “superficial wound to the front of his groin,” according to the Ukiah Daily Journal, and a bullet hole in his pants.

The female had apparently been trying to dispatch some mice on the trailer floor with a .44 magnum revolver, but dropped the gun as she pulled it from her holster. The gun fired, sending a bullet through her knee and across the front of the male’s pants. It struck his keys, went through his pants and stopped in his pocket. 

EPA registration of this control method is pending.

Hide: Insect occult
Halloween may be past, but since when do zombies follow the human calendar?

Researchers in Israel studied the jewel wasp, a particularly evil breed of bug.

Not content to just sting its victims, the flying harbinger of doom also has developed the ability to control minds.

The wasp injects its venom into the brains of cockroaches, which inhibits the roaches’ free will. They consistently inject their mind-altering chemicals into the same place in the roaches’ brains — the protocerebrum. The venom blocks a chemical called octopamine, which controls the roach’s motivation to walk (or run, very far away, now), according to a dispatch from National Geographic.

Now, we could all cite Plato and Hume and Descartes until we’re blue in the face; the fact remains that these wasps can control roaches minds.

The wasp then pulls the roach into its nest and lays an egg in its abdomen. The baby wasps then hatch and eat the incapacitated — but still living — roach.

The wasplings can then feed on the zombie roach for about a week, and fully emerge in about a month, ready to continue their zombification on another hapless roach.
Check out a video of this ahem procedure at www.pctonline.tv.