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Revisit The Year's Exciting Health, Science And Tech Breakthroughs In Texas

Photo: Courtesy of Children's Health System; Graphic: Molly Evans, KERA News

This year was full of breakthroughs in health, science and technology. Telemedicine made its mark in Dallas, "baby boxes" became a thing, and researchers got one step closer to understanding what causes blurry vision for astronauts.

Revisit three of our favorite Breakthroughs stories from the year below.

1. New moms in Texas started putting their babies in cardboard boxes.

Credit Lauren Silverman / KERA News
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KERA News
Baby Penelope lounges in a "baby box." Her mother, Taylor Freed, got the box for free after taking an online course about how to get babies to sleep safely.

It sounds like a joke, but "baby boxes" are really a thing. It’s part of a larger initiative to lower the infant mortality rate.

A little background: In 2015, more than 3,500 babies died unexpectedly. One of the most common ways babies die is by accidental suffocation — being smothered by sleeping too close to parents, pillows, soft toys or blankets. The idea behind the boxes is to remove all those objects and promote safe sleep — cheaply — for all moms.

So far, more than a million "baby boxes" have been distributed across the world – and one company headed by a Texan wants to hand out 400,000 boxes this year in Texas, mostly through hospitals.

Explore the full story.

2. Telemedicine in Texas kept kids and families together after Hurricane Harvey.

Credit Children's Health System
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Children's Health System
Children's Health set up a telemedicine clinic inside the Kay Bailey Hutchinson Convention Center, which served as Dallas' largest shelter after Hurricane Harvey hit.

After Hurricane Harvey hit Texas there was a major scramble to treat victims at shelters in Dallas. The key was finding a way to treat kids without causing more trauma.

Nurse Laura Link helped care for kids at shelters in Baton Rouge after Hurricane Katrina and in Dallas after Hurricane Gustav in 2008. Both times, the challenge was the same: deciding whether to send a sick kid to the emergency room.  

"These children have already been displaced, they’re scared to death and we’re going to pick them up out of a place that’s becoming familiar and plop them into a busy ER?”

One way to avoid that trip to the ER is with a virtual doctor's visit, or "telemedicine."

Explore the full story.

3. Texas researchers used spinal taps to help understand what’s behind astronauts' vision change.

Credit Courtesy of David Ham
Trent Barton, a Dallas resident, was one of the volunteers for a study looking into pressure inside the brain during space flights.

For years, Dr. Benjamin Levine has been on a mission to find out what causes astronauts vision to change. The leading theory was that microgravity raises pressure in the head and reshapes the eyeballs, which could be problematic for long-term space travel to places like Mars.

To test the pressure theory, Levine decided to stick needles inside people’s brains.

Really, he found eight healthy cancer survivors who already had ports in their heads, once used to deliver chemotherapy. Those ports would allow him to directly measure their intracranial pressure.

Then, he convinced them to get on a plane, for a sort of extreme roller coaster ride to simulate the zero gravity found on the International Space Station.

Turns out, Levine says, space flight doesn’t cause pressure to be much higher than it is when you or I are standing up. 

Explore the full story.

Lauren Silverman was the Health, Science & Technology reporter/blogger at KERA News. She was also the primary backup host for KERA’s Think and the statewide newsmagazine  Texas Standard. In 2016, Lauren was recognized as Texas Health Journalist of the Year by the Texas Medical Association. She was part of the Peabody Award-winning team that covered Ebola for NPR in 2014. She also hosted "Surviving Ebola," a special that won Best Long Documentary honors from the Public Radio News Directors Inc. (PRNDI). And she's won a number of regional awards, including an honorable mention for Edward R. Murrow award (for her project “The Broken Hip”), as well as the Texas Veterans Commission’s Excellence in Media Awards in the radio category.