[Rear View]

Shrunk: Tiny Trucks Made by Hand

Talk about attention to detail: Larry Bradbury, a technician at First Quality Pest Control, Northridge, Calif., spent six months and 300 hours building a 1⁄12-scale model of his truck.

He built the entire thing from scratch: The Nissan Frontier body is mostly basswood; he filed the all-metal motor, pump and plumbing by hand out of brass and aluminum. The chemical box in back is complete with miniature chemical jugs, a gopher probe and traps. And a clipboard with route slips, a box of business cards and the company’s rules and regulations notebook sit on the passenger seat.

And it’s not Bradbury’s first attempt: He built the first model truck (a Mazda) as a surprise gift for the now-retired co-owner Ron Howard’s 60th birthday. (That one came  with a scale model of Ron in a company uniform and a sprayer.) The current owner, John Gloske, said the office mantle didn’t look the same without the model, so Bradbury set to work.

“It’s steady work,” Bradbury, now 61, said of his 35 years in the industry. “You’re like your own boss when you’re out in the field.”

Stuck: Recipe for Fossilized Insects

Take one insect stuck in resin on the surface of a tree. Allow more of the resin to flow from the tree and cover the insect. Wait a few million years, and voila — one fossilized bug.

OK, yeah, the recipe works well enough for an ant or a mosquito. But what about insects who live in the water, smart guy?

Well, it turns out that, in this case, the simplest explanation is the most likely. Researchers from museums of natural history in Berlin and Florida studied the idea in swamps near Gainesville, Fla., and published their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

They found that the resin slowly drips down from a tree into a pool of water. Resin and water don’t mix, so the sticky stuff forms these globs in the pond that float through, trapping aquatic bugs. When the bugs tried to free themselves, they just got stuck in more.

Then, the proverbial prehistoric pond dries up, the resin hardens and, after another few million years, a fossilized aquatic bug. Pretty simple, really.

Sucked: Vacuum Cleaners Fight Fleas

What a way to go. Research from Ohio State University shows that a trip through a common household vacuum cleaner is enough to exterminate fleas with extreme prejudice.

The study, published in the journal Entomolgia Experimentalis et Applicata, shows that the abuse rendered on fleas is so great that 96 percent of adults and 100 percent of younger fleas die, according to a report by the Reuters wire service.

Glen Needham, a professor of entomology at OSU, studied the cat flea, Ctenocephalides felis, and said that the vacuum brushes wear away the fleas’ cuticle. Then, left in a dark bag with little but the dog hair and crumbs and other household detritus, they dry out and die. Apparently, Needham and his associates were so surprised at this result that they repeated the experiment several times.