For over ten years in the “BioTex” seminar at NTCC, honors students have experienced a November “email shootout.” This is something like a cross between an ongoing basketball game with scores changing in real time, and a fast-paced, scholarly-poetic thinkathon. The course challenges students to conceptualize the elements of their Texas history research essays, to utilize crossover “analogs, (terms)” particularly from biology and other scientific fields, and to provide terse definitions of newly minted concepts.