Andrew Weber

Starting in 1869, the timeline below chronicles past floods that hit the Austin area.

Today's Wayback Wednesday looks back at Austin's onetime Victorian-era literary magazine, The Rolling Stone. The DIY-minded rag published short stories, cartoons and other Onion-esque items, but it is largely known as the first creative sandbox for its publisher, William Sydney Porter.

Porter, a North Carolina transplant who moved to Austin in the late 1880s, worked as a druggist and as a clerk at the General Land Office before he took a job at the First National Bank as a teller. It was during his time as a teller that he started The Rolling Stone in 1894. 

Thirty-five years ago Thursday, the Armadillo World Headquarters was on its last leg.

After a decade on the scene, Eddie Wilson's legendary club had one last blowout to bookend its time at the forefront of Austin's live music scene, culminating in a New Year's Eve party on December 31, 1980.

The “Star Wars” hype machine is in full effect.

It’s impossible to look at any screen without seeing something plugging the latest reboot of the space opera, “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” which hits Austin theaters tomorrow night. But, a long time ago in the wake of Alderaan’s untimely end, before Luke lost a hand and before George Lucas’ prequel trilogy took the franchise far, far away from its roots, some of the original film’s key players sat down with Austin’s own Carolyn Jackson to talk about the film.

Imagine a test that could tell you instantly whether or not you had a case of strep throat, or just a bad cold. No doctors. No waiting. No hassle.

That’s the idea behind research from UT Austin’s Ellington Lab, published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology. The so-called “DNA walker” developed by Cheulhee Jung, Peter Allen and Andrew Ellington isn’t the first ever created – DNA walkers are fairly common in nanotechnology – but its mechanics are different than any other ever devised.

Believe it or not, this month is Passport Awareness Month – the two-fortnight campaign in which the State Department encourages citizens to renew or apply for their passports. At worst, it’ll take six weeks to get a passport; at best, three weeks.

This afternoon, the Austin City Council’s Public Utilities Committee and Health and Human Services Committee are both taking on an issue that’s trickled through, and sometimes flooded, City Hall: fluoridation of water.

The issue’s prevalence has ebbed and flowed over the years in city politics, but two Austinites, both with the surname Taylor, at opposite ends of the spectrum helped water fluoridation boil over into the national spotlight.

After months of controversy swirling around the statues memorializing Confederate leaders on UT’s campus, the group tasked with helping President Greg Fenves decide their ultimate fate handed up their recommendations on Monday.

The group tasked with providing solutions to the controversy surrounding statues of Confederate figures on the University of Texas at Austin campus has submitted its suggestions to the school’s president, Gregory Fenves.

Forty-two years ago today, Vander Clyde died of a drug overdose in Round Rock.

Clyde, who performed as Barbette, wasn’t an archetypal Round Rocker (if there is such a thing) in the sense that, for a stretch of his 68-year life, he was a sensation in Paris’ vaudeville scene, became the muse of a proto-surrealist avant garde poet and filmmaker, and went on to become a circus director for Ringling Barnum Circus.

Have you ever wondered about if you could recycle your paper coffee cup? Or if the cap from that Topo Chico you had would gum up the recycling sorter? Have you wondered the fate of that plastic bag you filled with recyclables and tossed into the blue bin with trepidation? 

Well, today was your lucky day, Internet user. 

This morning Austin Resource Recovery took to Reddit for an "Ask Me Anything" (AMA) to answer Austinites' burning recycling questions — offering a glimpse of a possibly forthcoming composting program and tips on what exactly to do with all those plastic bags you've been hoarding. Check out the highlights below.

Tomorrow, the Dallas Cowboys start a month-long training in Oxnard, Calif., ahead of the 2015-2016 season. The state of California has long been a staple base of operations for the Cowboys – California Lutheran College in Thousand Oaks served as the team’s longest-serving venue for camp from 1963 until 1989, and the state’s hosted 10 camps since 2001.

But, before the Cowboys migrated back to California for camp, the team spent its most productive (and controversial) summers right here in Austin, when the team used St. Edward’s University as a base of operations during their Super Bowl runs of the 1990s.

In the early hours of Tuesday morning, the Iranian government and six other nations, including the U.S., agreed to a deal that would limit the country’s nuclear program in what some see as a historic moment for the country’s foreign relations.

Since country’s regime change, relations between Iran and the U.S. have been peppered with crises. However, shortly before the overthrow of the Shah in January of 1979, the U.S. hosted his family and Austin’s Bergstrom Air Force Base (now Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, even hosted the exiled Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi in 1978.

Last week’s Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges represents a monumental step in the movement for LGBTQ equal rights, but it wasn’t the final footfall in Texas. As the case's lead plaintiff Jim Obergefell put it last week in a rally at the State Capitol, issues surrounding employment and fair housing protections aren’t codified in Texas state law.

But, in Austin, the city council passed a sexual preference employment protection in August of 1975, and a “public accommodations ordinance” that banned discrimination based on sexual preference in 1976. So why, despite those progressive policies, did an Austin organization lead an initiative to allow discrimination on the basis of sexual preference?