A Friend of Unfair Park dispatches this look at Addison's new water tower, which is presently making the rounds on Reddit. And, yes, those are wind turbines on top -- 10 total, each eight feet tall, the point of which is to operate the water tower and power the street lights on Arapaho. The city's been planning this public work-slash-art project since 2009; says the website it's "possibly [the] only wind-powered water tower in Texas," and it was designed in part by Dallas artist Brad Goldberg, who "sees his work as a fusion between sculpture, the landscape and the built environment." (So he says.)

Autumn Rose Reo, who handles PR duties for Addison, says they broke ground on the project in October 2010. They didn't plan on having it finished till August of this year, but a grant that helped fund the turbines necessitated they start spinning by the end of this month. And so, says Reo, "They fired up the turbines last week." Coolest thing to come out of Addison since Primer.

Photos by Leslie Minora

The first in a series of escalators that will give visitors a lift from the sweeping lobby to the hall of dinosaurs.

​A Perot Museum of Nature & Science curator wound us through the fourth floor of the partially completed space, calling upon visitors to imagine the 80-foot-long dinosaur that would soon occupy where he was standing. Next to that prehistoric giant will be the 25-foot Pachyrhinosaurus perotorum, that horned dino named after the Perot family, the $185-million museum's namesake and chief donor.

Another reptile will hang from the ceiling, with a wingspan the curator compared to a fighter jet and a true bird's-eye view of view of downtown from the windows on all sides of the museum's open floor plan. Architect Thom Mayne of Morphosis aimed to highlight the "middle ground between nature and architecture," he says. "And everything is connected to the city." And it's really freaking cool.

More >>

​A Friend of Unfair Park dispatches this report from the U.S. Geological Survey: My near-neck of Northwest Dallas had itself a teensy-tiny earthquake in the wee small hours of the morning -- at 12:11:49, to be precise. As in: "Magnitude 2.0." Or, as Matt Peterson calls it, a "microquake." Which, I am told, is far less exciting than a "housequake."

Per the coordinates, the event, such as it was, occurred on (well, beneath) Northwest Highway, between Inwood and Midway, not too far from the Original Pancake House, which reminds me: breakfast. Oh -- didn't feel a thing. Seldom do that time of day.

Photo by Anna Merlan

Apparently, this is how you announce you've raised $185 million a year earlier than expected.

​For days we've been promised a major announcement today from the Perot Museum of Nature & Science; as in, said the week's worth of press releases, "a MAJOR announcement" would be made this morning. And even though it wasn't exactly a secret by the time the press conference rolled around at 10:30, we're still glad we went -- if only for the DVD's worth of new renderings we received and the photo-op up top.

It seems like only a few months ago (because it was) that the Perot Museum of Nature & Science was announcing J.P. Morgan Chase would be handing them a giant check for $1 million bucks or so. At a press conference today that featured champagne, confetti and the aforementioned kids in a box of balloons, they announced that with the help of a $6 million gift from the Moody Foundation to help fund the Children's Museum, the under-construction museum on Woodall Rodgers has surpassed its $185-million building goal a full year ahead of schedule.

"We expect to see millions and millions of people through our doors over the coming decades," Nicole Small, CEO of the museum, told the crowd.

More >>

Via.

​Forgive us for seeming a little primate-obsessed today, but the Dallas Zoo is giving us an awful lot of material. Hot on the heels of the news that a Twitter-savvy "rogue" spider monkey got loose this morning and was quickly captured, we heard back from Dr. Lynn Kramer, the deputy director for animal conservation at the zoo and the aquarium. We'd been in touch with the zoo last week about this report out of Cincinnati, which says that two female gorillas, "Madge" and "Shanta," will be sent to Dallas to "socialize" Patrick, a silverback who's been living alone for the past couple years. According to that report, the two females are "very socially savvy and highly skilled at how to approach a new silverback. They use a combination of non-confrontation, appropriate aggression, sexual persuasion and retreat to deal with a silverback's personality."

"Right now we're the bachelor pad," said Dallas Zoo spokesperson Susan Eckert, who we wish we could call for quotes far more often. She said the decision to bring in new females was a painstaking one: "So much planning goes into it." If the same was true of humans, she said, "people would probably be married a lot longer."

Kramer told us that the zoo has three male gorillas right now, two juveniles who live together and Patrick, who's in his own enclosure.

"He's been in a building with the other gorillas and so he's been able to see, hear, smell them," he said. "But he hasn't been directly in with them."

Turns out Patrick had an "altercation" with a couple females last year, and the Species Survival Program (SSP), which pairs animals together to allow them to socialize and breed, decided to move those females to another institution. But the SSP has decided the time is right to bring Patrick in with the female gorillas from Ohio, who were previously part of large troupe there. "They've been with other males and females and so they know how to act properly," Kramer said.

The females will arrive in Dallas tomorrow, but will immediately go into a 30-day quarantine to be checked for diseases and allow them to become acclimated to the zoo diet. Then they'll go into an adjacent cage to Patrick, with mesh between them, to give them time to get acquainted. At some point, the mesh will be lifted and all three of them will be allowed to be together, Kramer says. With any luck, they'll be on exhibit publicly in his enclosure by next year.

More >>

​A couple of months back, ABC News noted that even in the midst of Texas's historic drought, Houston was seeing a "sudden surge" in the number of mosquitoes carrying West Nile. Why? Because it's Houston. But now, it's Dallas's turn -- or, at least, your turn if you live in the area of town bounded by Interstate 20, Garden Grove Drive, Belt Line Road South and Lawson Road West back to Interstate 20.

It's been, oh, a couple of years at least since the city had to bust out its mosquito-spray trucks. But Thursday night at 10 through the wee small hours of Friday morning, says the city, it's killin' time as "mosquitoes infected with West Nile virus were found in the area." Which means, as always:

While the insecticide is considered safe, residents in the above areas should avoid contact with the spray by staying indoors. Persons inside a vehicle while trucks are actively spraying should remain in their vehicles with the windows up and the air conditioner on until the trucks pass and the spray is no longer visible. Persons out during the scheduled spraying time should be alert for trucks and should not follow them. Residents who come in contact with the spray are advised to wash the affected area thoroughly with soap and water. The spray breaks down quickly in the presence of sunlight and has no residual effect. Fish ponds should be protected and pets should be brought inside during the spraying period.

Rendering by Steven McGann

​What you see at right is the urban garden the Deep Ellum Community Association would like to plant on this lot at Canton and Good-Latimer. The idea isn't new: In December 2009 we wrote about DECA's attempt to green up Deep Ellum, and initially they'd looked at planting on the site of the old Rock on Main Street. But the concept has grown significantly since then; hence the new site, for which organizers, led by Kelly Clemons, say they've got the permits and plans.

What they don't have is the money -- $25,000, to be precise, for everything from benches to sinks, lockers to lights. Which is why they've launched a group-funding effort via CrowdTilt, which is more or less like Kickstarter (complete with items offered at various levels of giving -- as in, $100 gets you a Deep Ellum Urban Gardens logo long sleeve shirt or hoodie, while $150 also snags an invite to a VIP dinner). Fund-raising efforts kicked off a few days ago, and already they're up to $1,190 with October 31 set as the deadline.

​There's no denying it now: Gulf War Syndrome, characterized by memory loss, lack of concentration, neuropathic pain and depression, is a physiological illness, not a psychological one.

A UT Southwestern study, published in the journal Radiology, used a specialized MRI that specifically measures blood flow in the brain and detected marked abnormalities in the brains of those with Gulf War Syndrome. Not only have those abnormalities persisted for 20 years, but in some cases they've worsened.

The findings mark a significant advancement in our understanding of the syndrome, which was for years written off by the Defense Department and the Department of Veterans Affairs as a form of combat stress rather than an objectively diagnosable injury. Dr. Robert Haley, chief epidemiologist at UT Southwestern, and a cadre of clinicians and researchers, have struggled with the government for some 18 years for research funding and to have the syndrome recognized as a legitimate war injury caused by chronic exposure to minimal amounts of sarin gas.

"This was really one of the first techniques to show an objective picture of whether there's really brain damage or not," Haley tells Unfair Park.

More >>

​We hear a lot about income inequality these days, as we do about our collectively clogged arteries. But it's less often that we're reminded of how one affects the other.

A study in the Canadian Medical Association Journal does just that, tracking the connection between cardiac arrest and income inequality. One of its authors tells Unfair Park that what it says about Dallas is "amazing" -- and not in a good way.

Researchers chose Dallas as one of seven metropolitan areas throughout the United States and Canada. All of the cities participate in a clinical research network called the Resuscitation Outcomes Consortium, and Dallas in particular was able to supply some apparently high-quality data. Not surprisingly, the study found that poor people are more likely to suffer from sudden cardiac arrest -- which in this country has a 5-percent survival rate -- than the affluent.

But that isn't what stunned Dr. Sumeet S. Chugh, the associate director for genomic cardiology at the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute.

More >>

​This just in from the National Weather Service:

DFW Airport has reached 100 degrees today. This ties the record for most 100 degree days in a year (69 days). We should easily surpass this record tomorrow.

Great. Swell. Awesome. Break out the ... well, not water. That'd be a waste. Which reminds me: Treehugger today wonders what Dallas, Houston and the rest o' Texas will do if and when the drought lingers into 2012 and '13. Besides turn into Mexico.

Around late summer of 2012, people will see that blaming EPA won't help. Air conditioning, lighting, water pumps: all that power driven stuff will become less reliable and life in Texas could start to resemble life in Mexico. The miracle that has been the Texas economy might trip on the cracks. (Generator sales will skyrocket, though, if you are looking to start up a small business.)