Texas A&M Extension Service

First, the good news: Crazy ants don't sting. They do sometimes bite, but the pain is mild, and it fades quickly. Even better, they drive out their stinging cousins, fire ants, which have been tormenting Texans for decades. Now, the bad news: When entomologists say "crazy," they mean it.

"When you talk to folks who live in the invaded areas, they tell you they want their fire ants back," Ed LeBrun, an invasive species researcher at the University of Texas, told the Los Angeles Times. "Fire ants are in many ways very polite. They live in your yard. They form mounds and stay there, and they only interact with you if you step on their mound."

Crazy ants on the other hand? They swarm madly over anything and everything, whether it's outside your home or not. With no natural predators, their colonies grow to 100 times the size of those of the typical ant colony. Homeowners have been known to sweep them out of houses with a broom. Also, crazy ants have developed an expensive taste for electronics. Computer mice are one example, but also transformers and electrical switches, where the carcasses of large numbers of shocked ants can cause short circuits and clog switching mechanisms.

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Billy Pemberton, drinking from the spring a short walk from his house.

Tucked at the bottom of a hill off Highway 175 in southern Dallas there's a spring. That it hasn't been paved over is remarkable. That you can still cup your hand and drink from it without getting dysentery or guzzling a toxic chemical stew is little short of miraculous. This is the middle of the city, just a short hop from the decidedly less pristine junction of White Rock Creek and the Trinity River.

But there it is, beckoning travelers like an oasis just as it has for centuries. The Caddo Indians knew it. Sam Houston camped there in 1843 en route to a treaty conference with the Comanches and other tribes. John Neely Bryan, Dallas' founder, drew water from the spring for the home he built nearby. Bill Holston, and Dallas Trinity Trails both describe the spring well.

Pemberton Spring -- or Big Spring, or White Rock Spring, or Bryan Spring -- has been threatened before, by plans calling for sewer lines to pass through, or by a gravel operation next door, or by a business that tapped the spring as a handy water source. Each time, the threat has been averted with the help of the city.

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Via.

We hope, for the flies' sake, that this is an organic orange.

There was a minor furor in the media last year when a study conducted by a researcher at Standford's medical school concluded that organic fruits and vegetables are no healthier than their conventionally raised counterparts. This wasn't quite as newsworthy as the headlines made it sound, since the study was looking mainly at vitamin content of produce, not at the chemicals that were or were not sprayed on it. Precious few people buy organic carrots expecting through-the-roof levels of beta carotene.

Then again, maybe they should. A new study by researchers at SMU, which is clearly more definitive than the Stanford one because it's newer, suggests that eating organic food may cause you to live longer. If you're a fruit fly.

They chose fruit flies essentially because they're easier to keep on an all-organic diet, since they can't sneak off and binge on Twinkies and they don't object to consuming a single type of liquified produce from Whole Foods (either potatoes, raisins, bananas, or soybeans, depending on the fly) for their entire lives. They also live for about a month, making it easier parse out the effect of diet on lifespan.

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The folks at the Perot Museum of Nature and Science are excellent at putting together infotaining science exhibits. They are not so good at handling a minor PR challenge.

That much became clear when, on December 30, a museum patron was injured. A week later, pressed by the Morning News, museum officials acknowledged that an adult male had suffered a "non-threatening" injury and that one of the museum's exhibits would be temporarily closed out of "an abundance of caution."

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Photo by Taryn Walker

Back in September, using the format of a totally ridiculous board game, we recapped the fight over gas drilling on land owned by the city of Dallas. At that point, the drilling task force had long since wrapped up its work, and a vote from the City Council on new drilling regulations was imminent, we said.

We said that. But we were wrong, because here we are now with 2013 bearing down upon us, and yet the council members appear no closer to voting on a new drilling ordinance. Let that be a lesson to you: never trust board games. The silence from City Hall, meanwhile, is really pissing everybody off, environmentalists and energy company types alike.

This morning, though, somewhat significantly, the City Plan Commission had gas drilling on its agenda. The CPC is the body that will ultimately have the power to approve or deny those applications for Specific Use Permits submitted long, long ago by XTO, who want to drill in an area near Hensley Field, and Trinity East, which leased a site near LB Houston and Luna Road. The two energy companies have been trying to drill in those areas since 2008 or so, and they'll need both an SUP and a special gas drilling permit from the city to move forward.

But very little actually happened at the CPC meeting, and now, it appears, one of the energy companies could be done trying to drill on Dallas land altogether.

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When Dr. Sean Morrison and a handful of researchers at UT Southwestern placed two lists side by side, it was as if the air had been pulled from the room. On one list were patients being treated for melanoma -- skin cancer -- and patients who had died from it. On the other list were mice who had been injected with cells extracted from the patients' melanomas.

"It was a chiling moment," Morrison, a researcher with the Children's Medical Center Research Institute, tells Unfair Park, "because we realized we knew before the patients knew who was going to die of melanoma."

If a patient was being successfully treated for a less aggressive form of skin cancer, the corresponding mouse fared similarly. If the cancer spread throughout the patient's body, so too did it spread through the mouse. For each of the 25 patients, the fate of the mouse that bore his or her cancer cells was mirrored. For the first time, science could predict to a certainty whether a cancer that kills nearly 50,000 people a year will metastasize. The research article was published Wednesday in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

"It's true that if I were diagnosed with melanoma tomorrow, I'd put myself into these mice to find out if I have a really bad melanoma or not a bad melanoma," Morrison says.

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A Dallas businessman, who for some unfathomable reason is choosing to stay anonymous, told an East Texas TV station that he has several photos of "a bigfoot," taken in Shelby County and just outside Dallas. (The video above comes from KLTV.com-Tyler, Longview, Jacksonville, Texas | ETX News.)

The man told KLTV's Bob Hallmark that he was camping in Shelby County when a bigfoot lobbed an enormous stone in his direction. Actually, although the news report doesn't dwell on this much, he claims to have seen not just one, but a "family group" of bigfoots -- or maybe bigfeet.

"An object landed within 10 feet of us that I know of no human being able to throw it that far," he told Hallmark, adding: "There was one about 10-foot tall. A family group drew in close, three of which got within 15 feet of me. It looked like something out of a Steven Spielberg movie, not human as I know it."

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The record-breaking drought that Texas endured in 2011 wasn't good for much of anything. Farmers and ranchers suffered, as did the people in towns whose water supplies ran dry. And let's not forget the owners of lakefront property whose lots fronted an empty stretches of parched earth.

See also:
A Decade-Long Drought? Yeah, Maybe So, State Climatologist Says

The lack of rain, though, was particularly hard on plants. Exactly how hard became a bit clearer yesterday when the Texas A&M Forest Service announced that 301 million trees in Texas died as a result of the drought. Forested areas in North and Northeast Texas fared particularly badly, losing more than 8 percent of their trees.

The A&M survey, the product of three months worth of on-the-ground tree health assessments and satellite imagery, focused only on rural areas. A previous survey of cities and suburbs counted 5.6 million dead trees.

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Earlier this week, Time magazine opined that West Nile disease, which has now killed 12 people in Dallas County and sickened almost 300 more, is a "self-inflicted wound." Bryan Walsh wrote that an extremely mild winter and scorching summer created a great breeding ground for mosquitoes. Climate change also isn't helping: As the climate warms, tropical diseases are becoming more common outside the zones where they were once traditionally found.

But Walsh also blames poverty for the spread of West Nile: "[T]he South is also the poorest region in the U.S. -- especially in Gulf Coast states like Louisiana and Alabama, where the poverty rate can push 20 percent," he writes. "If we can't fix that problem, this summer's brush with West Nile will look like a bug bite compared to the troubles to come."

For those of us who have watched as some of Dallas County's wealthiest areas were hardest hit by West Nile, one response comes to mind: Huh?

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There are many possible explanations for why this year has turned into the worst ever for West Nile. A mild winter and wet spring played a part, and maybe climate change contributed as well, but no one's really sure. Except Time, that is.

Bryan Walsh has a piece on one of the magazine's blogs titled "Why West Nile Virus is a Self-Inflicted Wound."

Despite the forceful headline, which implies that all of this mess -- the disease, the spraying, the deaths -- is somehow our fault, the article doesn't marshal much of an argument to support the claim. It mentions the foreclosure crisis, which left an unusually high number of abandoned swimming pools, as a contributing factor and points to climate change as a reason tropical diseases are creeping further into places like Texas.

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