When Lanarion Norwood Jr. was 9 years old, he opened his family’s refrigerator to find it almost empty. His grandmother, unemployed because of disability, had run out of food for the month. So Norwood did what many young children adamantly resist: He went to bed early. Sleeping, he reasoned, would help him suppress hunger, and he knew the next day he could eat at his Atlanta school.

That memory is one of Norwood’s earliest recollections of being hungry, but not his last. As a teenager, his food concerns grew with his appetite. “I would plan out my meal[s],” Norwood says, now a freshman at Morehouse College in Atlanta. “I knew I could eat breakfast and lunch at school and I could eat again later at [an afterschool mentoring program].”

Lots of kids like Norwood rely on schools for food their families can’t afford. Federal programs like the National School Lunch Program offer free or discounted meals to children from low-income families. But two reports out this month from the Urban Institute and Feeding America suggest one group is falling through the cracks: teenagers. Roughly 7 million children in the U.S. aged 10-17 struggle with hunger, according to one report, which examines teenage access to food. Dogged by hunger, teenagers may try a wide range of solutions, from asking friends for meals to bartering sex for food.

To learn about teen hunger, the researchers partnered with food banks and, with funding from Conagra, conducted 20 focus groups across the country with adolescents from low-income families. The researchers found two challenges to feeding teens in need: First, some of the charitable programs that target young children — like backpack programs that allow kids to take food home over the weekend — aren’t always offered to teenagers. And second, even when programs are available, teenagers feel more self-conscious about accepting free food or may not realize that they are eligible for the assistance.

Lead researcher Susan Popkin of the Urban Institute explains why the challenges facing teenagers are unique: “It’s easier to get to little kids. They’re all in school. They’re certainly more cooperative. Teens are often seen as the problem. Not as part of the solution.”

Teens, Popkin explains, are more aware of the stigma associated with a free lunch than younger children. They’re also at an age where fitting in is paramount. So many teens will forego official programs and try to get meals from other places – by going to a friend’s house with a well-stocked pantry, for example.

Norwood says pride is a major hurdle. “Why should I have to go through a program just to eat when I’m almost grown?” he says, describing the attitude of some of his peers.

Even adolescents who do opt to take advantage of school programs may not get a good meal, according to Popkin, because they often receive the same portion sizes as elementary school children. What’s more, teens often squirrel the meal away for younger siblings.

“They feel the pressure that their parents are under,” she says. “They’re old enough to be aware of it and they want to help. They go hungry along with their parents.”

Teenagers cope with hunger in other ways too, the researchers found. Teenagers try to get jobs, but often struggle against the competition of adults with more experience and more flexible hours. The jobs they can get — like cutting hair or mowing grass — often don’t pay well enough to bridge the gap in the family’s food budget.

Sometimes teenagers turn to less benign methods to get money or food. Teenagers in the focus groups cited petty theft and even gang membership as methods adolescents used to put money and food on the table.

Most surprising to Popkin was that some teenagers, girls in particular, date older men with more disposable money in order to get food. Thirteen of the 20 focus groups talked about trading sex for a meal.

What can be done to improve the plight of food-insecure teenagers? Popkin says simply extending elementary meal programs to teenagers could be a start, as well as increasing portions with age.

Emily Engelhard, managing director of research and evaluation for Feeding America, says teens came up with other ideas as well, like tying free food to another less stigmatized activity – like movie night or a basketball game. She says an important takeaway from the research is “just how incredible and resilient these teens are.”

Better and more accessible grocery stores in low-income neighborhoods would also help, says Norwood. He says many people in Atlanta have to take a bus or train to reach a grocery store with fresh produce and can’t afford the time or fare, to say nothing of lugging the groceries home.

He sums up the importance of teen hunger simply: “It is real. It is serious. And it should be addressed. It affects the mind, it affects the body, and it affects the soul. Without that, what do you have?”

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Donald Trump sat down with controversial TV host Dr. Mehmet Oz on his show, set to air Thursday, to discuss his personal health and medical history.

The Republican presidential nominee’s campaign had said earlier Wednesday he wouldn’t be releasing on The Dr. Oz Show the results of a physical the 70-year-old candidate underwent last week. But a press release from the show said the two did discuss the recent physical along with his personal health, his views on health care policy and his recent proposal for child care and maternity leave:

“Mr. Trump shared with Dr. Oz the results of his physical examination performed last week by Dr. Harold Bornstein, M.D. of Lenox Hill Hospital, whom has been Mr. Trump’s personal physician for many years,” the statement read, also noting that Dr. Oz “took Mr. Trump through a full review of systems” including his nervous system, bladder and prostate health, cardiovascular health, gastrointestinal health, family medical history and more.

Bornstein released a letter last December declaring that Trump would “be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency” and called his health “astonishingly excellent.” NBC News reported last month that Bornstein had written the letter in five minutes while a limo sent by Trump waited outside his office.

Wednesday’s taping was closed to the press, but NBC’s Katy Tur reported that a source inside the studio said Dr. Oz read the full report of his physical and “said he was very healthy and that he would be happy if any of his patients had similar results.” His blood pressure was reportedly good as was his cholesterol, though he is on cholesterol medication. He weighs 267 pounds (though other reports have said the number was 230 pounds) and Dr. Oz said Trump was “slightly overweight.” Trump also said “never has a need to go to a hospital because he’s too healthy.”

According to a CNN interview with an audience member, Trump also said he wants to lose about 15 pounds.

Trump also reportedly had some surprising comments about his exercise regimen and eating habits, per NBC’s Jesse Rodriguez.

Both candidates have been under pressure to release more of their medical history. Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, 68, is set to return to the campaign trail on Thursday after falling ill with pneumonia.

The choice to reveal medical results on a TV talk show is an unusual one for a presidential candidate, but one that is certainly in line with the former reality TV star’s unconventional campaign. Oz, a cardiothoracic surgeon by training, developed a loyal following after appearing on The Oprah Winfrey Show through the years. But the celebrity doctor has also come under scrutiny for hawking products that have no scientific validity, particularly weight-loss supplements. Oz also said on Tuesday he wasn’t going to ask Trump “questions he doesn’t want to have answered.”

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Three years ago, Geoff Baird bought a drone. The Seattle dad and hobby plane enthusiast used the 2.5-pound quadcopter to photograph the Hawaiian coastline and film his son’s soccer and baseball games.

But his big hope is that drones will soon fly tubes of blood and other specimens to Harborview Medical Center, where he works as a clinical pathologist running the hospital’s chemistry and toxicology labs. In the near future, Baird and others say, drones could transform health care — not only in rural areas by bringing critical supplies into hard-to-reach places, but also in crowded cities where hospitals pay hefty fees to get medical samples across town during rush hour. By providing a faster, cheaper way to move test specimens, drones could speed diagnoses and save lives. “It’s superexciting to me,” Baird says.

The technology seems to be there. Drones are delivering pizza in New Zealand and taking condoms to parts of Ghana that lack reliable roads or access to birth control. Tech giants and big retailers, including Amazon and Wal-Mart, are testing drones for deliveries and pickups.

However, “blood specimens are not like a book or a shoe,” Timothy Amukele, an assistant professor of pathology at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, said in a TED talk earlier this year. No one knew whether bumpy flights would hurt cells or otherwise make biological samples unsuitable for lab tests.

So Amukele and co-workers conducted several experiments to find out. In their first study, published in PLOS ONE last July, the team collected several hundred blood samples from healthy volunteers. They drove the samples to a flight field an hour northwest of Baltimore, packed half of them into foam containers and flew them around in a drone for up to 40 minutes. The other samples sat. All specimens went back to the lab for 33 routine tests. The results were the same for each group, suggesting samples stay intact during drone flights.

In follow-up analyses, drone transport also seemed safe for samples containing microbes and for donated blood. The microbial study was published in August in the Journal of Clinical Microbiology; a manuscript on the blood products study is under review. (Videos of each experiment can be found here.)

“The results don’t surprise me,” says Bill Remillard, chief technical officer at TriCore Reference Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M. “But until you do the science, you just don’t know.”

TriCore handles nearly three-quarters of New Mexico’s clinical lab testing. And in a sparsely populated state, moving samples over large distances is expensive. TriCore spends $3.5 million per year. So after Remillard heard the results of Amukele’s first drone experiment at a meeting last summer, the two started discussing a possible pilot study using drones to transport lab samples in New Mexico.

While Amukele’s experiments show it’s feasible to move lab specimens with drones, pilot studies in real clinical settings are still needed to work out logistics. Questions include how to request a drone, where it would land, who would pick up the samples and how often a drone would need new batteries.

Safety is another concern. Some drones drop cargo with parachutes or other release mechanisms, making it harder for people to tamper with the vehicles. But as far as how safe drones are, “those data don’t yet exist,” Amukele says. Though millions of drones have been sold worldwide, “we don’t know how many crashes happen and how many are due to operator error,” he says. The Federal Aviation Administration is starting to collect this data.

It’s a promising development for an industry where legislation has lagged behind the fast-advancing technology. For years, the FAA had imposed a near-ban on commercial drones, only allowing them to fly if businesses applied for an exemption. But in June the agency announced a set of rules for companies to operate drones in the United States, and on Aug. 29 those regulations took effect. The FAA expects the number of registered commercial drones to jump 30-fold, from 20,000 to 600,000, within months.

“The rules had not been well defined. This is an attempt to define them,” says Lawrence Williams, who heads business development at Zipline, a Silicon Valley startup making drones for medical applications. Zipline is focusing much of its effort in Rwanda, where less crowded skies, relative to the U.S., make it easier to negotiate drone delivery of blood samples.

Another drone startup, Vayu, whose CEO is a co-author on the PLOS ONE drone study, is also dipping into the international arena. In July, the Michigan-based company did a demo flight in Madagascar, carrying specimens from a remote village to a lab for testing. Vayu makes a quadricopter plane capable of vertical takeoff — an appealing feature for hospitals with limited landing space.

While it’s easy to see how drones could improve health care in poor countries, Amukele thinks medical drone delivery could make a bigger splash in the U.S. Compared to Africa and developing countries, the U.S. does much more testing per person, he says, and many of the country’s 200,000 medical labs are collection-only sites that rely on central labs for testing. So “there are likely to be more [medical drone users] in the U.S. than anywhere else,” Amukele says.

As Zipline prepares to launch blood delivery drones in Rwanda, the company is also seeking regulatory approval for three projects using drones to bring medical supplies to underserved communities in the U.S.

One project would integrate drone delivery of medications with telemedicine appointments at a small clinic in rural Maryland. Another would use Zipline drones to link a large health care distribution center to hospitals and tribal clinics around Reno, Nev. And for the third project, the company would partner with a regional blood bank in Washington state, creating a plan to distribute blood to various hospitals and clinics in the event of earthquakes and other natural disasters.

Johns Hopkins was initially skeptical of Amukele’s experiments — the review board thought his first proposal was a joke — but now the university is giving the pathologist space and funds to hire a drone engineer and continue researching medical delivery drones.

In Seattle, Baird is working with Amukele and aeronautical engineers at the University of Washington on their own drone proposal. Ideally their test flights would take samples from Seattle Children’s to Harborview, a bustling facility that runs thousands of tests each day. However, that flight path would violate the FAA rule requiring drones to stay within the pilot’s line of sight. So the initial plan is to run 2-mile line-of-sight flights between the children’s hospital and UW Medical Center, Baird says.

Drones could be a huge help in poison emergencies, Baird says. In a typical scenario, a child gets rushed to the emergency room after accidentally swallowing some pills. Though routine tests can rule out some things, clinics often send samples to a centralized toxicology lab for confirmation and further testing. This can take hours. A drone could zip samples downtown in five to 10 minutes, Baird says, helping a child get diagnosed and receive medications more quickly.

He also envisions drones collecting samples from patients’ homes and taking them to the hospital. You could prick your finger and rub the blood onto a card that a drone could fly back to the lab for testing, Baird says.

In the meantime, though, Zipline’s U.S. projects remain on hold, awaiting the regulatory go-ahead, and the Seattle team continues studying maps and sketching flight routes for the small drone test it hopes to launch. The team has presented the plan to grant agencies and gotten positive responses — but no funding yet.

Like other technological advances, Baird suspects drones for medicine will “wait, wait, wait and then go very quickly.”

Esther Landhuis is a freelance science journalist in the San Francisco Bay Area. Follow her at @elandhuis.

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