by Sonny Shipp, Scout.com

Ryan Perrilloux came to LSU as Scout.com’s Player of the Year for the Class of 2005 and was one of LSU’s most heralded high school players to ever come out of Louisiana.

He enjoyed a stellar prep career at East St. John where he accounted for 118 overall touchdowns in his last two years alone. He ended his career with 12,705 total yards, which still ranks second all-time in Louisiana behind Brock Berlin.

The problems began early on for Perrilloux before the ink on his national letter-of-intent was even dry as he proclaimed on National Signing Day that he would win numerous Heisman Trophies for the Tigers and paid very little respect to LSU’s young quarterback tandem of JaMarcus Russell and Matt Flynn.

From there the circus hit the road and it took Perrilloux through a federal counterfeiting investigation and then a casino fiasco where the talented, but troubled, quarterback got caught trying to enter with a fake I.D.

LSU coach Les Miles suspended Perrilloux after the casino ordeal and he missed all of the summer workouts as a result of the disciplinary action.

Once the players reported to fall camp for the 2007 season, Perrilloux was reinstated and served as Matt Flynn’s backup for the Mississippi State and Virginia Tech contests.

LSU fans got their first glimpse of what Perrilloux could do when he got his first start against Middle Tennessee State.

The competition may not have been up to SEC standards but Perrilloux dazzled the Tiger Stadium crowd with his rocket of an arm and his knack for making big plays with his feet. He finished the night with 298 yards and three scores through the air and ran for 52 yards before lost yardage from sacks brought his total down to 37.

All in all, the talented signal caller completed 80 percent of his passes on the evening, but more importantly, he gave Tiger fans some hope that if Matt Flynn did not recover from the high ankle sprain he suffered against Virginia Tech then the national championship dream would still be alive.

Flynn returned to action against South Carolina and led the Tigers to victory but he did so with help from Perrilloux, who gained 59 yards on the ground on only eight rushes.

Speculation surfaced that Perrilloux missed some team meetings the week after South Carolina and although no statement was ever released it was very odd that for the first time all year he saw very little action when it was painfully obvious that Flynn was not close to being 100 percent against Tulane.

Many would have thought that the Tulane game would have served as a wake-up call but four weeks later Mr. Perrilloux was in the news again for a fight that happened at a local nightclub during the bye week preceding one of the biggest games of the year at Alabama.

Perrilloux was not charged by police for the incident at the Varsity nightclub but he was disciplined internally and did not play in the narrow win over the Crimson Tide.

Miles played Perrilloux sparingly the in the two weeks leading up to the home finale against Arkansas, when talk of him breaking team rules began to surface again.

Flynn suffered a shoulder injury against the Razorbacks but he finished the game and Perrilloux did not see the field.

Despite the regular-season ending loss to Arkansas, LSU made it to Atlanta for the SEC Championship Game and had a sliver of hope that it could make it to the BCS Championship Game.

Tennessee was standing between the Tigers and any chance of making it to a BCS bowl, let alone the game for all of the marbles that was in LSU’s backyard.

To make matters worse, LSU had to face a Tennessee squad without Flynn and had to rely on a field general that had been very unreliable all year long.

Perrilloux stepped up and delivered a sterling performance against the Volunteers and was selected the game’s most outstanding player on the offensive side of the ball.

Once again, the standout quarterback showed what he could do on the field but there never was any question about his skills between the lines. It was his decision-making off the field that Tiger fans and the LSU coaches were concerned with.

LSU went on to win the BCS Championship and a lot of credit must go to Perrilloux because he played a big role in the Tigers’ storybook season.

Once the season ended, though, the problems began to arise again as Perrilloux was suspended for spring practice.

He was expected to return to the practice fields several times throughout the spring but he did not complete the requirements that were set forth by Miles, which included work in the classroom and some extra running and conditioning work. As a result, he missed all of spring practice and did not play in the spring game.

Miles actually reinstated Perrilloux with full privileges the week before the spring game and when the Tigers left to go to Washington D.C. to meet the President of the United States he was right there with everyone else.

There was talk that President Bush took a little time to speak to Perrilloux and if that did in fact happen then it had little effect.

Exactly what the final straw was that made Miles dismiss his projected starting quarterback for the Tigers’ upcoming title defense is still unclear.

What is clear, though, is the fact that Miles gave Perrilloux every opportunity to turn his life around and no one can fault the Tigers’ head man for that.

“Ryan was given every opportunity to be a part of this football team,” Miles said. “In the end, he didn’t fulfill his obligation as an LSU student-athlete. We hope that a new beginning will benefit him.

“I wish Ryan and his family nothing but the best in any of his future endeavors.”

You will hear plenty of rumors of what the straw was that broke Miles’ back but rumors and innuendo do not do a kid that has some serious issues he needs to sort out any justice.

Three suspensions and more drama surrounding an LSU player than I can ever recall, the Ryan Perrilloux book is finally closed but there are many missing chapters.

A book that could have been filled with dreams that turned into reality will now be overflowing with stories of what could have been.

There are going to be plenty of comparisons made of Perilloux and talk about what he could have done on the Tiger Stadium turf over the coming days, months, and even years.

The biggest comparison will probably be made to former LSU running back Cecil Collins, who had all of the talent in the world and the ability to get paid millions of dollars to play the game of football.

Yes, Perrilloux has that same type of talent and ability.

But, for the young man’s sake, let’s hope he gets his life on track and doesn’t take the same road that Collins traveled.

Get all the latest LSU football and basketball info at Scout.com.

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — LSU quarterback Ryan Perrilloux has been dismissed from the team. Head coach Les Miles says that Perrilloux “didn’t fulfill his obligation as an LSU student-athlete.” He is declining additional comment.

LSU said Friday that Perrilloux is expected to finish out the spring semester at the school.

Perrilloux ran up against the law and team discipline with regularity at LSU. He was on the fringe of a counterfeiting investigation and was caught trying to enter a Baton Rouge casino with a false identification. That got him suspended all of last summer.

He also was involved in a fracas at a nightclub in November, but he was cleared of wrongdoing.

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Bats play a bigger role than birds do in controlling tropical insects, and the loss of bats might mean that morning cup of coffee gets more expensive, researchers said on Thursday.

Two separate studies show bats eat far more insects than birds do, protecting plants of the rain forest and, in one of the studies, coffee plantations.

The studies, published in the journal Science, suggest that the loss of bat populations worldwide might affect agriculture — not to mention make warm evenings outside more uncomfortable, the researchers said.

“Bats are impacting ecological systems in all kinds of ways, and I just want them to get the credit they deserve,” said Kimberly Williams-Guillen, a tropical ecologist at the University of Michigan who led one of the studies.

Williams-Guillen and colleagues studied bats at Finca Irlanda, a 740-acre (300-hectare) organic coffee plantation in Chiapas, Mexico.

In previous studies of insect damage, scientists have simply covered plants to keep off birds and then counted the bugs and measured what they ate. They forgot to account for what the bats did at night.

Williams-Guillen and her colleagues set up three types of enclosures — one that only excluded birds, one that only excluded bats at night, and nets that kept out birds and bats day and night.

During the summer wet season, the coffee trees under the nets that kept the bats out had 84 percent more insects, spiders and other bugs than unprotected plants, they reported.

Birds had far less of an effect, they said.

HANGING OUT ON PLANTS

Margareta Kalka of the Smithsonian Institution in Balboa, Panama, and her team did a similar experiment in what she described as pristine rain forest.

“Insects could freely pass through the nets to eat the plants, hang out on the plants,” Kalka said in a telephone interview.

“Both bats and birds had a significant effect on plants. And in our particular study … we found a bigger impact of bats than from birds,” Kalka added.

Plants shielded only from birds during the day had double the insect damage of plants that were uncovered, Kalka said. But plants netted at night to keep bats out had three times the usual insect damage.

The findings have important implications for conservation, Kalka said.

“Bats worldwide are suffering,” she said in a telephone interview. “People still don’t understand what are the threats to bats. Climate change may be a threat to bats.”

Williams-Guillen’s team agreed.

“Bat populations are declining worldwide, but monitoring programs and conservation plans for bats lag far behind those for birds,” they wrote.

Williams-Guillen also noticed that bats do not only catch insects on the fly — a technique that helps them eat half their body weight in a single night.

Many also perched upside-down from branches, swooping onto nonflying insects and other pests as they munched on leaves.

Kalka said it is clear why people credit birds with protecting crops.

“People like birds better and they are more obvious — they are colorful, they are singing,” she said.

“People love them — they see them eating bugs off leaves. It seemed more obvious that birds have a role in pest control. Bats hunt in the dark so it is really hard to study them. They are completely overlooked.”

(Editing by Will Dunham and Xavier Briand)

NEW YORK (Reuters Life!) - Got a passion for buying sneakers? It could be a good sign, with a poll finding that people who buy three pairs of sneakers or more a year are far more likely to be a leadership type than other people.

Mindset Media, a media company that examines personality traits of different consumers, found that people who buy more than three pairs of sneakers a year are 61 percent more likely to have the qualities of a modern leader.

These qualities were defined as having ideas and vision, and a style with others that is both inclusive and decisive.

The survey of 7,500 people, using market research group Nielsen’s online panel, found multi-sneaker buyers were 50 percent more likely to be very assertive and 47 percent more likely to be spontaneous.

Lauren Arvonio, a spokeswoman for Mindset Media, said sneaker buyers were more likely to fly by the seat of their pants.

“It is often said you can tell a lot about a person by the shoes they wear, and now we have some hard data to back that up,” Arvonio told Reuters.

“What is interesting is that these personality traits held true across the board, regardless of age, income, or gender.”

Previous Mindset Media surveys found that people who pay their credit card bills off each month were more likely to be “highly deliberate,” thinking through their actions, but also less modest than others, likely to brag about their habits.

Hybrid car owners were found to be 78 percent more likely to be highly creative than other people and less dogmatic.

(Writing by Belinda Goldsmith, Editing by Patricia Reaney)

By  Anna Boyd

New research has revealed that mobile phones are more injurious to people’s health than smoking. Why is that? It seems that mobile phone usage and brain cancer are linked to each other.

According to one of the world’s top neurosurgeons, British Vini Khurana, using mobile phones for 10 years could double the risk of brain cancer. “This danger has far broader public-health ramifications than asbestos and smoking,” he told the Independent of London.

Dr. Khurana based his assessment on the fact that three billion people now use the phones worldwide, which is three times higher than people who smoke. Smoking kills some five million globally each year.

Dr. Khurana reviewed more than 100 previous studies on the effects of mobile handsets and concluded people should avoid using cell phones whenever possible and called on governments and industry to take “immediate steps” to reduce radiation exposure through the devices.

“In the years 2008-2012, we will have reached the appropriate length of follow-up time to begin to definitively observe the impact of this global technology on brain tumor incidence rates,” he said.

The French government has already warned against mobile phone use, particularly by children. Also, Germany and the European Environment Agency have urged its people to minimize their exposure to mobile handsets.

The Mobile Operators Association, last week, rejected Dr. Khurana’s study as “a selective discussion of scientific literature by one individual.” It “does not present a balanced analysis” of the published science, and “reaches opposite conclusions to the World Health Organization and more than 30 other independent expert scientific reviews.”

Dr. Khurana posted his analysis on a neurosurgery Web site and a paper about his research is currently under peer review for publication in a leading scientific journal.

[Source: efluxmedia.com]