LANDIS HONORED FOR DISABILITIES WORK; A DRUG-SNIFFING CAR; DRONES DELIVER TRANSPLANT ORGANS

Every day, Dallas Innovates staffers scan websites looking for the most interesting, important, and unusual stories about innovation and creativity. Here are three we thought you’d like:

Restaurateur Tom Landis, owner of Howdy Homemade, was the subject of an article in Dallas Innovates recently about how he employs people with special needs at his restaurant. Landis has been honored with the Ryan Albers Lifetime Achievement Award from a nonprofit called Connecting Point of Park Cities, a program for adults with disabilities that we wrote about in April. The award is named for Ryan Albers, a 17-year-old who suffered a traumatic brain injury during a skiing accident. Albers was a Highland Park football player and straight student, who now uses a wheelchair for mobility. You can read more about Landis and the award here.

It may look a lot like any other Ford sedan on a North Texas street, but Dr. Guido Verbeck and a team from the University of North Texas are using the car to develop what could be a new high-tech tool in law enforcement. It is equipped with technology that can sniff the air and recognize chemical signatures, allowing officers to be alerted to possible drug-making activity.

Dallas-Fort Worth is a major center for organ transplantation, so any innovations in that field are of importance to many people. Among the new technology changing the world, drones are being used for photography, video, surveying, damage assessment, and for recreational purposes. Now, there’s a company that is using drones to help save the lives of people in need of organ transplants. EHang’s drones are being used to transport organs in emergency situations, pairing with the pharmaceutical transplant tech company, Lung Biotechnology.  You can find out more here.

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