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How Some of Texas's Toughest Species Are Inspiring EngineersAmong the many enduring images of Hurricane Harvey’s 2017 devastation in Houston was the reminder that when faced with floodwaters, fire ants will assemble in groups of up to 100,000 and link their legs together to create nearly watertight rafts that can span several square feet. The venomous red hexapods then collectively float to safety before releasing and continuing their important work as backyard terrorists.Now researchers at Texas A&M have drawn inspiration from the phenomenon and mimicked it to develop synthetic materials that can autonomously assemble, disassemble, and reconfigure in response to different conditions, such as changes in light or heat. Professor Taylor Ware of A&M’s biomedical and materials science engineering programs, one of the authors of the study published in Nature Materials, says he…

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This story was originally published in January 2022 and has been updated.No Texas city has Austin beat for the sheer volume of worthy barbecue destinations. Sure, the Houston area’s widespread suburbs might be richer in excellent barbecue, and the Fort Worth scene is hot and new, but the volume of world-changing barbecue within our Capital City’s limits is staggering. Last year, Texas Monthly released a list of the best new barbecue joints in Texas. In 2021 we published our top fifty barbecue joints list, along with fifty more worthy of honorable mentions, but our barbecue recommendations don’t stop there. You can get a great meal of smoked meats at any one of these barbecue joints in Austin (and in two of its suburbs).In the city of AustinB. Cooper Barbecue This unassuming trailer…

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JSX Love Field American Airlines SouthwestMinutes before boarding begins for a flight from Dallas to Houston, it’s library quiet inside the terminal. No testy TSA agents yell out instructions. No overhead announcements drone on endlessly about limited overhead space. The loudest noise is the click-clack of a flight attendant’s heels on the concrete floor as she walks by two dozen passengers reclining on cushy couches and chairs.It’s so serene that even Alex Wilcox, CEO of the airline, seems surprised that a departure is imminent. “Oh, I guess people are checking in,” he says as a couple rolls bags past him. They’ve just dropped off their car keys at the valet outside the private hangar at Love Field.All this calm comes at a cost. The airline, Dallas-based JSX, charges business-class fares…

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Dallas Love Field Legend AirlinesAllan McArtor won’t ever forget the day Legend Airlines ran out of gas—literally. He was CEO of the Dallas-based carrier when it went broke in December 2000, after having waged a $20 million legal battle against American Airlines and the City of Fort Worth to secure the right to get off the ground in the first place.“We had a fuel-purchase contract that we needed to pay,” McArtor, now 81 years old, told me recently from his Virginia home. “Our supplier was fully expecting me to say, ‘Look, we’re going to make it. We’ll get you paid.’ But I wasn’t going to lie to them. So we had to shut things down.”Legend may have lost its business war, but its legacy lives on. Had the airline…

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Travis Clardy Exit InterviewWhen state representative Travis Clardy, of Nacogdoches, first heard rumblings of a potential Republican primary challenger early last summer, he was surprised. The woman who was considering challenging him, Joanne Shofner, was someone who Clardy said he knew “socially” for years. Shofner’s late father, Welcome Wilson, a longtime Houston real estate developer and a former chairman of the University of Houston System Board of Regents, had previously donated to Clardy’s campaign. Clardy figured she’d at least set up a meeting to talk before entering the race—but that never happened, he said. “Before I know it, she’s out campaigning, filing treasury paperwork, and setting up booths at our downtown events,” Clardy said.An eleven-year veteran of the Texas House, Clardy had seen his fair share of primary…

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Willie Nelson and John LeventhalJohn Leventhal is one of the most important record producers working in Americana music today. But the eloquent New Yorker, who’s also a hit songwriter and virtuoso guitarist, readily acknowledges that placing his collaborations in that catch-all genre doesn’t tell you much about how they actually sound. To make that determination, you’ve just got to listen. You could start with the rootsy groove of his wife Rosanne Cash’s 2014 album The River and the Thread, which earned the two of them three Grammys. Or the Southern soul of his 2016 album with Stax legend William Bell, This Is Where I Live, which also won a Grammy. Or go all the way back to his first big splash, Shawn Colvin’s 1997 album A Few Small Repairs…

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Keesey Canyon Overlook in Fort DavisWest Texas boasts no shortage of peaks from which to look out and be humbled by the Trans-Pecos volcanic field unfolding before you. Davis Mountains State Park contains dozens of vistas, but a particularly hypnotic one can be found at the Keesey Canyon Overlook. The highest point along the park’s Skyline Drive Trail, it offers a rustic wooden bench that serves as an ideal resting spot for hikers who’ve conquered the formidable switchbacks along the climb to get here. From 5,500 feet above sea level, the view stretches toward the town of Fort Davis, to the southeast, over a sea of  agarita, catclaw acacia, cholla, and trompillo covering the remnants of a volcanic eruption that transformed the landscape some 35 million years ago. Turn your…

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Muleshoe Bend.Fresh off a ninety-minute hike that led me down a rocky hillside, past the crumbling remains of an old stone chimney, and onto a sandy beach along Lake Travis, just east of Marble Falls, I ease myself into a steamy outdoor tub and tip back my head. Dang, I think. Parks have gotten fancy.As I recall, Texans once visited parks simply to do typical outdoorsy stuff: hike, pitch a tent, jump in a river, and maybe grill up a few burgers. But at a string of Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA) parks, including Shaffer Bend Recreation Area, where I lolled like a dumpling in a soup pot, that’s just the starting point.The LCRA produces and delivers electric power and manages roughly six hundred miles of…

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Ren Faire documentary sxswAlmost every year since 2016, my friends and I pack our cars with booze, bustles, corsets, and camping equipment and head east for the Texas Renaissance Festival, the largest ren faire event in the country. I grew up in Grimes County, fifteen minutes outside the fairgrounds in Todd Mission, and have attended the festival intermittently my whole life. My annual return is akin to a homecoming; I almost always see at least a few folks from my past, slinging turkey legs or driving horse carriages. And so it was with eager anticipation, and just a tad territorialism, that I shuffled into the Saturday evening South by Southwest screening of the first episode of Ren Faire, a three-part HBO docuseries coming this summer. Ren Faire centers…

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How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Dressing Like a CowgirlI think it was the snow-white standard poodle with the matching fuchsia collar and leash that caused my first symptoms of cosmic dissonance. It was February, and I was at Tootsies, forever one of Houston’s most fashionable stores, and arguably the most Houston of Houston’s fashionable stores, to check out a rodeo wear party, an act that was already causing me some mental disturbance. That was partly because the marquee lights spelling out the word “RODEO” were blinding, the countryish music was blaring, and the racks and racks of clothes in the designated stomping grounds were adorned with enough denim, fringe, and studs to gussy up the entire female population of San Angelo. Even more disorienting was finding myself surrounded by super glam twenty-, thirty-,…

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