Trypanosoma cruzi, the etiological agent of Chagas disease, is a vector-borne parasite traditionally associated with sylvatic environments. We investigated the prevalence of T. cruzi in triatomines collected from El Paso County, Texas, and southern New Mexico. Specimens were morphologically identified as Triatoma rubida and subjected to quantitative PCR for parasite detection. Molecular sequencing of satellite and microsatellite DNA targets was performed to confirm species identity and assess strain lineage. Infected vectors were collected from both sylvatic and urban locations, including Franklin Mountains State Park and residential areas in El Paso (TX) and Las Cruces (NM). Of the 26 triatomines tested, 88.5% were positive for T. cruzi, representing a significant increase compared to a previous regional study, which reported an infection rate of 63.3%. The high prevalence of T. cruzi-infected T. rubida, particularly in urban and peri-urban areas of El Paso and Las Cruces, underscores the increasing public health significance of Chagas disease along the U.S.–Mexico border. These findings highlight the urgent need for sustained vector surveillance, advanced molecular characterization, and focused public health interventions to reduce transmission risks and raise clinical awareness in affected regions.

Understanding biotic responses to environmental changes will help identify extinction risks and direct conservation efforts to mitigate negative effects associated with anthropogenic-induced environmental changes. Here we use the Quaternary fossil record of mole salamanders (Ambystoma) from the southwestern United States and northern Mexico to reveal geographic patterns of extirpation since the Pleistocene. Ambystoma are known to have previously inhabited regions of central Texas on the Edwards Plateau; however, they are largely absent from the region today. We used a well-dated fossil record of Ambystoma from Hall’s Cave combined with other fossil sites in the region to deduce why Ambystoma was ultimately extirpated from the Edwards Plateau and to test hypotheses related to temperature-driven body-size changes in line with the temperature–size rule. We propose that Ambystoma was likely extirpated from the region due to changing temperature and precipitation regimes that caused increased mortality and disruptions to breeding and larval development. We found some support for decreased body size in Ambystoma with increased temperature during the late Pleistocene, suggesting that body size may be an important feature to monitor in modern populations of Ambystoma as salamanders become subjected to increasingly hotter temperatures in the coming decades.

This study introduces a data-driven benchmarking method to assess the relative price and profit efficiencies of cattle auction sales. Transaction inefficiencies represent the divergence between observed sales and their corresponding maximum feasible value. Data envelopment analysis is used to assess market efficiencies and to identify the optimal array of animal characteristics based on peer comparisons. In Texas, about half of the evaluated transactions were inefficient. Furthermore, by modifying some of the observed attributes, sales prices could increase by 23% and profits improve by 74%. Efficiency results can be used to develop effective value-added management practices and educational programs.

The Weches Formation of the Claiborne Group (Eocene) in northeast Texas consists of clayey sandstones and mudrocks, both with variable proportions of dark green to brown clay peloids deposited in a marginal to open marine setting on the Gulf Coast margin. The composition of the dark green peloids, from two localities, has been investigated using X-ray diffraction, back-scattered electron microscopy with X-ray analysis, electron energy-loss spectroscopy (EELS), Mössbauer spectroscopy, chemical analysis and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy. These peloids were previously described on the basis of their color as glauconite (Yancey and Davidoff, 1994); our results, however, show that the dark green indurated pellets are predominantly composed of mixed-layer clays with a high proportion of Fe-rich 7 Å serpentine layers coexisting with a mixed-layer phase containing glauconite, nontronite and vermiculite layers, in addition to discrete illite and kaolinte. Analyses by EELS of single particles with a chemical composition consistent with them being the Fe-rich clay indicate that the Fe is >95% ferric, while Mössbauer analyses of the bulk magnetically separated fraction for the same samples indicates a ferric iron content of ∼60–70%, despite the variable relative proportions of expandable and 7 Å layers. Taking into account that there is a significant amount of 2:1 layers containing ferric Fe, we interpret these data as indicating that the Fe in the 7 Å layers has a significant amount of Fe2+ even taking into account the high ferric Fe ratio from the EELS analysis when the coexisting 2:1 layers are considered. Thus, these 1:1 layers are closer to berthierine in composition than to odinite. The vermiculite layers in the Texas clay may indicate partial ‘verdinization’ of expandable 2:1 clay. A possible reaction is smectite → vermiculite → berthierine-like phase. We estimate a temperature of 20°C for the seawater in which the Texas clay formed, the lower end of the range for modern occurrences of odinite.

Community involvement in research is key to translating science into practice, and new approaches to engaging community members in research design and implementation are needed. The Community Scientist Program, established at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston in 2018 and expanded to two other Texas institutions in 2021, provides researchers with rapid feedback from community members on study feasibility and design, cultural appropriateness, participant recruitment, and research implementation. This paper aims to describe the Community Scientist Program and assess Community Scientists' and researchers' satisfaction with the program. We present the analysis of the data collected from 116 Community Scientists and 64 researchers who attended 100 feedback sessions, across three regions of Texas including Northeast Texas, Houston, and Rio Grande Valley between June 2018 and December 2022. Community Scientists stated that the feedback sessions increased their knowledge and changed their perception of research. All researchers (100%) were satisfied with the feedback and reported that it influenced their current and future research methods. Our evaluation demonstrates that the key features of the Community Scientist Program such as follow-up evaluations, effective bi-directional communication, and fair compensation transform how research is conducted and contribute to reducing health disparities.

Contrary to Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell’s majority opinion in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez (1973), Texas’s school finance system was the result of years of legislation and state-building that gave some areas the resources and capacity to provide more educational opportunities than others. As this article demonstrates, during the century leading up to the Rodriguez decision, Texas political leaders developed a public school funding system reliant on the highly unequal spatial distribution of property wealth across rural/urban, class, and racial lines. There was nothing inevitable about this. In fact, the history of Texas’s system reveals four pivotal eras when the state’s White leaders created and maintained a school finance system reliant on local property taxes and defined by rural/urban and racial differences that cemented deep inequalities. This case study traces those changes over time and brings part of the story to life through the example of Kirbyville, Texas, and its struggle to finance a new White high school. Returning to the historical roots of school financing in Texas reveals how rural/urban, racial, and wealth inequalities have been foundational to Texas’s public school finance system.

The Bolivar Archaeological Project exemplifies the possibilities of archaeology as service, incorporating descendant communities and local stakeholders into the fabric of the research design and planning for a state infrastructure project. This collaborative, multidisciplinary project attends to marginalized histories to offer a model for how publicly funded cultural resources management archaeology can serve multiple goals. The Bolivar Archaeological Project was conceived as a public archaeology project, with dual goals of being community driven and yielding scholarly contributions. In the shifting rural–urban landscape of Denton County, a Texas Department of Transportation road improvement project has supported archaeological investigations of two nineteenth-century sites—a blacksmith shop and hotel—associated with the historic Chisholm Trail. The blacksmith shop belonged to Tom Cook, an African American freedman, whose descendants reside nearby and became active participants in the investigations, including as collaborative authors in this article. The project illustrates the importance of representation and praxis to realize inclusive community engagement, with this article outlining the development of the project and ongoing research. Informed by Black feminist archaeologies, the project works at the intersections of local communities and state infrastructure while navigating landscapes of fraught histories and presents to forge an archaeology for the twenty-first century.

Through the lens of the school board, this essay examines school governance dynamics as a southern, historically white public school district struggled to implement school desegregation. In 1976, the city of Waco simultaneously elected its school district's first trustees of Color, Dr. Emma Louise Harrison and Rev. Robert Lewis Gilbert. Harrison and Gilbert used distinctly different political strategies to navigate the racially hostile school board environment, but ultimately, as this article demonstrates, neither strategy enabled them to overcome white supremacy in Waco. This seemingly obvious point reveals a notable yet underemphasized drawback of school desegregation: that it failed to upend structural racial injustice. The case of Harrison and Gilbert illustrates that this limitation was reflected in the token number of Black trustees on the boards of desegregated schools and the concerted white resistance they met in working to spur meaningful racial change.