Michael Marks | Texas Standard

From Texas Standard:

Certain skills can give students an edge when it comes to getting noticed by a university. Often, those skills are related to sports or academic achievement. But now, another skill is helping some students get noticed – and rewarded: social media influencing.

From Texas Standard:

In Southeast Texas, mosquitoes aren't exactly beloved. So it's curious that biotech company Oxitec is planning to release millions of them in Harris County.

Gabriel Hamer, associate professor of entomology at Texas A&M University, says the company plans to do so with the ultimate goal of reducing the number of mosquitoes in the area.

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The Milwaukee Bucks were scheduled to play the Orlando Magic in the NBA playoffs on Wednesday afternoon. Instead, they kicked off one of the biggest strikes in American sports.

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Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, they say, but it’s tough to argue that some animals are just more beautiful than others. The sea slug, for example, is an invertebrate that many might rank fairly low, aesthetically speaking. But perhaps that reaction needs to be reconsidered, given how a particular species recently caught the eye of Texas beachcombers.

The sea slug in question doesn’t look anything like a slug.

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In late April, Tate Lombard was named the newest head coach of the girls basketball team at his alma mater – Canyon High School — in the Panhandle. It’s a great job, especially for a young coach like Tate, who is 36.

But it comes with pressure.

From Texas Standard:

Sen. Elizabeth Warren announced on Tuesday she's dropping out of the Democratic presidential primary. At the beginning of the race, the group of Democratic candidates competing for the office was the most diverse ever assembled. Now, it's down to two white men in their late 70s.

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Just as it was in 2016, health care is an important issue for voters as they prepare to cast ballots in primaries and in November's general election. And health care is an especially relevant topic in Texas, as the state continues to opt out of Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act and faces rural hospital closures and high maternal mortality rates.

From Texas Standard:

Santiago Jiménez Jr. has conjunto music in his blood.

The son of legendary accordion player Don Santiago Jiménez, he has carried the torch for traditional conjunto for six decades. He has recorded over 700 songs on over 100 albums, and he's played his accordion for crowds in every corner of San Antonio — and even most parts of Texas. Beyond that, he won a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a National Medal of Arts.

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The lionfish is a scourge in the Gulf of Mexico. It's a beautiful creature, but not native to that body of water, and that causes problems.

From Texas Standard:

Cannabidiol products – better known as CBD – are fairly new to Texas. They usually come in the form of oils, drinks or snacks containing the nonpsychoactive chemical compound found in cannabis, THC. CBD products usually contain just a minuscule amount of THC, and can't get you high, but when ingested, some say they alleviate inflammation and anxiety. But in Texas, where products containing THC are mostly illegal, where does that leave CBD? The city attorney of Edinburg recently asked just that in a letter to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

Molly Smith, a reporter for the McAllen Monitor, says the city attorney wants Paxton to issue a formal legal opinion because he says there's a legal "grey area" in Texas. Smith says most people, including CBD vendors, assume it's legal because their products contain such a minute amount of THC – less than what's legal under the Texas Compassionate Use Act, which allows people with certain severe health conditions to use products with less than 0.5 percent THC. Plus, she says federal law also makes it easy to assume that CBD is legal.

From Texas Standard:

The term "socialism" seems to be an early front-runner for the top buzzword of the 2020 election season. Democrats and Republicans have been using the word a lot lately, but what does it really mean?

At the recent Conservative Political Action Conference, President Donald Trump told the crowd, "Democrat lawmakers are now embracing socialism. They want to replace individual rights with total government domination."

But Jennifer Mercieca, associate professor of communication at Texas A&M University specializing in political rhetoric, says the way Trump characterizes socialism is different than its technical definition.

From Texas Standard:

In the United States, over 10 million children live below the federal poverty line, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. It's the lowest child poverty rate in decades, but researchers and public policy experts are determined to bring down that number even further.

In a recently published report called "A Roadmap to Reducing Child Poverty" from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, its co-authors suggest policy changes that they claim could cut child poverty in half in just 10 years.

Cynthia Osborne contributed to the report. She's associate dean and director of the Center for Health and Social Policy at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. Osborne says the irony of child poverty is that it's expensive.

From Texas Standard:

The total market value of the video-gaming industry reached almost $135 billion in 2018, and with that growth has come an increased demand for game developers. In hopes some of its graduates stand out in that market, the University of Texas at Austin is launching a new degree program in video game design and development.

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Ever heard of bartonella henselae? It’s the bacteria behind an illness you’re probably more familiar with – cat scratch fever. What about this one: bovine spongiform encephalopathy? You may know it better as mad cow disease. As you can see, nonscientific names for certain afflictions tend to stick. But sometimes, their meanings may get lost in translation.

The Calhoun Port Authority has spent $360,000 in taxpayer money to defend itself against a lawsuit filed by the Victoria Advocate newspaper. The suit alleges the authority violated open-meetings rules during the hiring process of disgraced Congressman Blake Farenthold.

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Where do tornadoes come from? It's not a riddle or a trick question, although the answer may seem obvious: the sky, right? Evidently, that's not the case.

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The border, the wall, the immigration issue – they're all front and center right now in Washington, as they have been almost every day of 2018.

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The name Georgia O'Keeffe probably brings to mind images of giant, brightly-colored flowers, or the artist's famous skulls, sunsets or the Southwest. Many people don't realize that Georgia's sister was also an artist in her own right. But that's changing, thanks to an exhibition of Ida O'Keeffe's work at the Dallas Museum of Art It's called "Ida O'Keeffe: Escaping Georgia's Shadow."

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On Election Day in Stanton, just north of Midland, Ron Black was skeptical that a particular measure on the ballot would pass.

“Well, I think at first it was - uh, nobody thought it would go through because they’ve tried it so many times, you know? I can’t tell you how many times it’s gone to the ballot,” he says.

From Texas Standard:

When it comes to crops, Texas has one of the most diverse portfolios around. But here's one commodity you won't find: industrial hemp. The square cousin of marijuana has no psychoactive properties, but it does have a whole range of practical applications for things like textiles, food and fiber. The problem is that in most places, it's illegal to cultivate it. But a bill currently being considered by Congress could change that, and it has the support of Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller.

THC, the chemical that gets marijuana consumers high, is only present in minute amounts in hemp, Miller says.

From Texas Standard:

First, to make sure we’re all on the same page, homecoming mums are something that vaguely resemble a chrysanthemum corsage. From this fluffy centerpiece comes a stream of decorations: ribbons, braids, trinkets, pennants, teddy bears, Christmas lights – the gaudier and bigger the better. Giving a mum or a garter – that’s the smaller version boys wear on their arms – to your homecoming date is a uniquely Texas tradition. It is the type of thing that, when presented to non-Texans, typically elicits this kind of response:

When we think of cotton we just think of the fiber – the white fluffy stuff you see while driving down the highway. But there's a lot more to the cotton plant than that. In fact for every one pound of fiber cotton plants produce, about 1.6 pounds of cotton seeds are grown. And there's just not a lot you can do with cotton seeds other than plant more cotton.

But Keerti Rathore has been working for almost a quarter century to change that. He wants you to be able to eat cotton seeds.

Rathore, a Texas A&M AgriLife Research plant biotechnologist, has received approval for his genetically modified cottonseed from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

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Raising cattle anywhere is hard, but it’s especially hard in the Rio Grande Valley. And that’s thanks to fever ticks. They can spread a fatal disease that decimated cattle herds through the 1900s and is still feared today. And it’s not just the ticks themselves that can cause headaches, but the regulations designed to control them.