Landfills hold garbage and plastic — and the oceans do too. Traditional plastics stay around a long, long time. One goal with bioplastics is to make materials that will break down easily. Credit: NOAA Marine Debris Program

Landfills hold garbage and plastic — and the oceans do too. Traditional plastics stay around a long, long time. One goal with bioplastics is to make materials that will break down easily.

Plastic is like an annoying brother or sister: You can love it and hate it at the same time.

On the plus side, plastic is lightweight, strong and cheap. It can be hard or squishy, big or small, thick or thin. It’s the perfect material for food wrappers, eyeglasses, soda bottles, picture frames, dishes, keyboards, telephones and so much more.

On the down side, plastic contains chemicals that can harm the environment. These chemicals also threaten the health of animals, including humans.

There’s another problem, too. Plastic is made to be thrown away. But in fact it lasts for a really, really long time. And it’s piling up. Landfills and garbage dumps are full of it. There are even mounds of garbage in the oceans that cover thousands of miles. Plastic makes up a large percentage of that waste, says Eric Lombardi, executive director of Eco-Cycle, a recycling and educational organization in Boulder, Colo.

This floating trash includes all kinds of plastic. There are food wrappers, takeout containers and lots of small objects, like Styrofoam packing peanuts.

A study aimed at taking an inventory of plastic in the Atlantic Ocean sampled water using surface plankton nets. Much of the plastic was very small, millimeters in size. Credit:
Marilou Maglione, Sea Education Association

“They get blown into the ocean, and they look like food,” Lombardi says. “Animals eat them and fill their bellies up, but they starve to death. That’s the problem. Plastic is a big culprit.”

We’ll probably never get rid of plastic altogether. But scientists are working on a new generation of plastics that are better for the environment. Some are made from natural materials, like parts of corn or sugar plants. These are called bioplastics.

Some are also biodegradable. That means that they can break down into useful materials, like fertilizer to help plants grow. Already, Earth-friendlier plastics are being used to make water bottles, gift cards, forks and more. Frito-Lay reports that it recently started selling its Sunchips brand snacks in biodegradable bags.

As the technology improves, experts hope that, some day, all of the plastic we use will be better for the planet.

Marine residents and plastic don’t mix well. Credit: Ocean Conservancy

Plastic has been around for more than 100 years. Over that time, scientists have found new ways to mold the material into a variety of shapes, styles, colors and textures.

Today, most plastics are made from petroleum — oil that is drilled from underground. Drilling for oil can be tough on the Earth. And turning oil into plastic releases pollution. So does burning it in cars and factories. Much of that pollution comes out in the form of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide. These go into Earth’s atmosphere, trap heat and contribute to global warming.

“Consumers are aware that we need to take steps to reduce our dependence on oil and find more environmentally friendly solutions,” says David Stanton, manager of North American sales for NatureWorks, a company that makes materials for building bioplastics. Its headquarters are in Minnetonka, Minn. “We often introduce our product as: Plastic made from plants, not oil.”

NatureWorks buys corn from farmers who cultivate miles of rolling farmland in Nebraska. At the company’s milling plant near those fields, kernels get broken down to make lots of everyday products, such as oil, pet food, and feed for chickens.

For making plastic, the important part of the plant is unused sugar stored inside the kernel. The sugar is in a form called starch. To get it out of the kernels, machines cook the corn, grind it and pass it through screens.

These are tiny pellets of Ingeo, a kind of plastic made from corn. They will be melted and then shaped into various products. Credit: NatureWorks LLC

Next, microorganisms go to work. Through a series of chemical reactions, these tiny life forms (usually bacteria) turn starch (the sugar from the corn kernels) into a molecule called lactic acid. The lactic acid molecules then form rings that link up into long chains. The result is a plastic material called PLA. That stands for polylactic acid. (When placed at the beginning of a word, poly means “more than one.”) Finally, the plastic is formed into pellets. Ingeo is the name of NatureWorks’ brand of PLA.

Later, companies buy NatureWorks Ingeo and melt it into a jellylike substance. The material is stretched into thin sheets. Equipment then stamps out shapes and presses those shapes into products. Examples include food containers, laptop computers and gift cards. Ingeo can also be used to make fibers for clothes, rugs, even baby wipes.

NatureWorks calculates that making Ingeo spits out 43 percent fewer greenhouse gases compared to making traditional kinds of plastic. Making plastic out of plants also uses up much less oil.

Other companies make PLA plastic, too. And the material can be made from wheat, sugar beets and sugar cane. In the future, Stanton says, scientists will be able to use any part of any plant to make bioplastics, including the leaves. With new developments, he adds, these materials will appear in more kinds of products, from furniture to cars.

“Our next plant probably won’t use corn,” Stanton says. “There’s a lot of innovation coming.”

Break it down

It’s not just the process of producing plant-based plastics that is better for the environment. After being thrown away, these kinds of materials are supposed to have a leg up, too. Most plastics sit around for hundreds of years. But the new plastics are made to break down into dirt or just water and the gas carbon dioxide. Products don’t have to be made from plants to be biodegradable like this. Some human-made materials can break down in the same way.

But biodegradable plastics don’t always live up to their labels. Sometimes, for example, only a small fraction of a product is made from biodegradable materials. In those cases, the results are often worse. One reason is that this kind of mixed plastic can break down into especially harmful chemicals.

“You will see a lot of claims and miscommunications, saying, ‘My product is biodegradable or biodegradable in a landfill,’” says Ramani Narayan, a chemical engineer at Michigan State University in East Lansing.

“Suppose something is 10 or 15 percent biodegradable, but the 85 percent that’s remaining is not,” he says. “This remaining part has worse consequences than if you didn’t make it biodegradable. That’s the problem.”

Even if something is made only from biodegradable materials, you can’t just leave it in the sun or throw it in the trash and expect it to disappear. It won’t break down in those places. Instead, the plastic has to go to special treatment centers, called composting facilities. There, temperature and moisture conditions are just right for the material to disintegrate. The process can take weeks.

Composting facilities that do this exist in some neighborhoods, including in parts of Minneapolis, San Francisco and Boulder. People who live in these communities don’t have just trash cans and bins for recycling paper and glass. They also have a composting bin for banana peels, uneaten food and biodegradable plastic. The city takes them all away on trash day.

But most communities don’t have composting facilities. And home composting bins, which are good for turning food waste into garden feed, don’t work on plastics.

Do it yourself

Whether your city composts or not, there is one favor you can do for the Earth: Use less plastic. You can, for example, steer clear of snacks that use extra packaging, such as mini yogurt containers and small bags of crackers that contain single servings. Instead, look for bigger containers wrapped with less plastic. Even better, find stores that sell food in bulk so you can reuse your own bags and jars.

You might also try making your own stuff. And when things break, fix them yourself instead of throwing something away and buying it new, suggests Mark Frauenfelder, a writer in Los Angeles and author of Made by Hand: Searching for Meaning in a Throwaway World.

Among his list of projects, Frauenfelder makes his own yogurt and sauerkraut. He raises his own chickens. He carves spoons and spatulas as gifts out of branches that fall off a tree in his backyard. He has even tried keeping bees.

For Frauenfelder, doing things for himself started as a way to understand where ordinary objects come from and how they work. Along the way, he realized, he was putting fewer things in the trash.

“We live in a culture now where it’s a lot easier to throw away stuff that’s broken and buy new things,” he says. “It turns out that when you make your own things, in a lot of cases, the waste goes down, too.”

Power Words

bioplastic Plastics made from natural materials, like parts of corn or sugar plants.

plastic Adaptable or reshapable. Materials described as being plastics are often made from a recipe that allows them to be shaped or transformed and then locked into that shape through heating or some other processing. Some plastic materials are hard and brittle. Others, like foam or rubber-like substances, can be twisted or squeezed and then bounce back to their initial processed shape.

The venom in one scorpion can contain hundreds of different toxins. The deadly African fat-tailed scorpion (Parabuthus transvaalicus) has a toxin that can kill one type of beetle but not another. This variety and specificity could make scorpion venom a good source of natural pesticides. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

When a scorpion attacks, its victim rarely has time to fight back. First, the clawed creature grabs and pins down its target — maybe a cricket, grasshopper or spider. Using a stinger in its rear end, the scorpion jabs the victim’s flesh. Then, the true suffering begins.

After an initial shock of severe pain, the prey might start to feel burning and tingling sensations. Shaking and trembling ensue, followed by paralysis. If the victim doesn’t die from the venom, the scorpion will probably just eat it alive.

Even people can die from the sting some scorpions deliver. But despite the fear that scorpions inspire among many people, scientists refuse to run away or even fight back. Instead, they are drawing inspiration from scorpions and other stinging animals. In the safety of their laboratories, researchers are squeezing venom out of poisonous creatures. They are dissecting the venom, decoding its secrets, and making chemical versions of their own.

This is what venom researchers know: Understanding an attacker is the best way to steal its powers. With a growing list of discoveries, scientists are developing scorpion-inspired pesticides, cancer treatments, painkillers and more.

“Look at the world from the viewpoint of a scorpion,” says Raymond John St. Leger, an entomologist (insect expert) at the University of Maryland in College Park. “It wants toxins which can kill insects so it can eat those insects. Then it wants toxins for defense. In the case of something big and nasty like a child that comes to stomp on it, it wants to be able to defend itself. There are a lot of different chemicals there.”

Tapping into those chemicals, experts say, has enormous potential.

“This is one of the major resources that is naturally available to us,” St. Leger says. “It looks like [venom has] a very bright future, much of which we can’t predict.”

A world of venom

Many animals ― spiders, snakes, bees, stingrays, centipedes, anemones, ants and snails, to name some ― make venom. Compared with the venom from other animals, scorpion venom is one of the simplest types to study. It looks like a thick milky soup, and is made of a variety of molecules, including hundreds of small proteins called peptides.

Many of those peptides are toxic. That means that they have the power to harm the cells of unfortunate victims. They might cause paralysis, for example. Or they might kill cells. Venom toxins have to get inside cells to cause damage. There, they work in different ways to destroy cells or change the messages cells send to other cells.

To extract venom from a scorpion, scientists often use a long tool to hold the animal at a distance. A mild electric shock then causes the animal to squirt a little venom, which the scientists collect in a little test tube.

Venom expert Bora Inceoglu once studied a type of scorpion that was so aggressive, all Inceoglu had to do was grab the scorpion and the animal would squeeze out some venom. For protection, Inceoglu, who works at the University of California, Davis, wears only a pair of goggles. He doesn’t worry too much, because venom is harmless if it gets on your skin. He has never been stung.

“Initially, I was nervous, but then I got used to it,” he says. “My wife was with me one time, and she got so scared she had to leave the room.”

A typical squirt holds between 5 microliters and 50 microliters of liquid. One microliter is a millionth of a liter, and 50 microliters is the size of a really tiny droplet. A whole lot of toxic peptides can fit into even just a tiny amount of venom.

Once researchers have extracted venom, the real (and less scary) work begins. Using basic scientific techniques, scientists can pull peptides apart within the droplets collected. Then researchers look at the peptides and test them on animals. The goal is to understand what the peptides look like, how they differ from each other and what they do.

The research involves plenty of challenges. There are 1,300 scorpion species, and as many as 300 peptides in the venom of each one. Most of the peptides scientists know about so far are from one species.

Inceoglu estimates that there are probably more than 100,000 different peptides in the world’s scorpions. So far, scientists have identified about 500 of them. That’s just half a percent of the total that exist.

“That number is increasing,” Inceoglu says. “But we’re nowhere near the whole number.”

Putting toxins to work

As some scientists continue to identify and examine individual toxic peptides inside of venom, others are searching for ways to use those toxins to make the world better.

In one of the most promising approaches, venom toxins are inspiring pesticides that protect agricultural crops from insects. Scorpions are already really good at killing insects, after all. Why not copy what they do?

As an insect-fighter, venom has lots of potential. One reason is that each toxic peptide inside venom has had millions of years to target a specific type of insect. For example, some fat-tailed scorpions in Africa produce a well-studied toxic compound called AaIT. The toxin paralyzes some types of beetles but does nothing to others. It has no effect on humans. Other types of toxins might work only on grasshoppers or locusts. (The number and type of toxins determines how dangerous an animals’ venom is).

That kind of focused attack would be hugely helpful to farmers. Traditional pesticides are made from strong chemicals that tend to harm all animals equally. As these chemicals fight the bad guys, they also hurt the good guys, such as helpful insect pollinators, innocent farm animals like cows, and people. It would be more useful to have venom-like strategies that killed only mosquitoes that carry diseases or worms that eat corn crops.

Scorpion-inspired pesticides would also be safer and more environmentally friendly than chemicals because they would decompose. So, these pesticides wouldn’t build up in soil or water. They can’t get into the bodies of animals and people if they don’t get into water or food.

Scientists have already deciphered what some of these specific toxins look like and how they work. Researchers have even created versions that act like the originals.

The biggest challenge now is to make the venom-inspired pesticides do what they’re supposed to do. Spraying them onto plants won’t do: Insects can swallow venom without harm. Instead, researchers are experimenting with bacteria and fungi that can deliver toxins directly into the bodies of insects, just like scorpion stings do.

“They’ve got great potential,” St. Leger says. “What we need now is delivery systems.”

Healing powers

As crazy as it may sound, venom toxins might also help heal people.

Some scorpion venom toxins affect only the cells of mammals. These compounds probably provide defense against predators, such as coyotes and squirrels. But they also work on humans. That’s bad news if the venom comes from the stinger of a scorpion. In the hands of a doctor, though, the poisons might do good.

Toxic compounds that kill cells, for example, could be injected into tumors to fight cancer. Compounds that paralyze cells could fight pain. In fact, there is already a pain-killing drug available that was inspired by the venomous cone snail, a type of sea snail.

Nature has been doing experiments for hundreds of millions of years, St. Leger says. Some species and strategies have gone extinct. Others, like scorpions, have developed powerful chemicals for staying alive. As venom research pushes forward, there is a lot to be learned from what already exists in the environment.

“All we are left with is all of Nature’s successful experiments,” St. Leger says. “They teach us a lesson. They might show us that things we hadn’t thought of before are possible.”

The flight took off around 6:30 pm, just a little behind schedule. About half an hour later, a bomb exploded onboard. The plane broke apart. Chunks of metal showered a small Scottish town called Lockerbie. The accident, now known as the Lockerbie Bombing, killed all 243 passengers, all 16 crewmembers, and 11 people on the ground.

It wasn’t the first attack on an airplane, and it certainly wasn’t the last. Perhaps the worst, and most famous, attack happened on September 11, 2001. That day, terrorists flew two airplanes into skyscrapers in New York City. Nearly 3,000 people died.

But Pan Am flight 103 also stands out because it was one of the first times that terrorists carried out a major attack on a non-military airplane. The bombing also started a new era in science, says Doug McMakin, an electrical engineer at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash. Suddenly, airport security was a big deal.

“It kicked up research dollars on explosive detection technologies,” McMakin says. “This is one way [terrorists] try to put fear in us — by blowing up airplanes. What we’re trying to do is counter that threat.”

In the race to stay one step ahead of terrorists, researchers are working on a new generation of machines that can peer through fabric and see what people are carrying inside their clothes. Some airports are already starting to use these devices, called scanners.

Even as technology makes skies safer, however, worries have popped up. Some people wonder if airport scanners will threaten their privacy by showing every curve of their bodies and what’s in their pockets. People also worry about how the machines might affect their health.

Experts are doing their best to assure people that the new equipment is safe. More than that, it’s necessary. Our lives, they say, depend on it.

The long wait

If you’ve ever been on an airplane, you know the drill. After arriving at the airport, you wait in one snaking line to check in your luggage. Then you move to an even longer line, where you wait to get into the main terminal.

Security gates are a staple of modern airline travel. New work would add new detail to security screening.

fenlan1976/iStockphoto

After throwing away your water bottle, you show your I.D. and boarding pass to an official. You take off your jacket, belt and shoes. You put them on a conveyor belt, along with your carry-on bag. As X-rays zap your belongings, you walk through a doorframe that has no door. If it beeps, you start over.

As annoying as the whole process may seem, each step is designed to keep travelers safe. And behind the scenes, a whole lot of technology — and history — is involved.

When everyday people started traveling by air in the 1930s, they simply walked into the airport and onto their planes. In response to hijacking threats in the 1960s and 1970s, American airports began to require that passengers and their bags be screened. Airports added metal detectors to prevent weapons and explosives from getting onto planes.

Since then, airport security agencies have been pursuing the latest technologies. Every time an attack happens, new security rules follow. In December 2001, for example, the “shoe bomber” boarded a plane with explosives hidden in the soles of his shoes. After that, airports started to require that passengers send their shoes through X-ray machines.

A spectrum of strategies

Among the security technologies you may have already seen at airports are chemical-detecting swabs, explosive-detecting puffer machines, even drug-sniffing dogs.

Coming next are full-body scanners that look through clothes to detect what people might be trying to sneak through the gate. Two types of scanning technologies are in the works. One is called a backscatter machine. The other is a millimeter-wave system.

This illustration gives the general idea: New scanners in the works would quickly reveal what’s in your pockets.

cirnishman/iStockphoto

Both are already starting to appear in airports around the world. Still, experts continue to debate which one is better.

Behind both machines is the same science: the electromagnetic spectrum. The spectrum describes a range of energy forms, which travel and behave as waves. At one end of the spectrum are low-energy radio waves and microwaves. At the other end are high-energy gamma rays, X-rays and ultraviolet radiation. Visible light — what we can see — lies somewhere in the middle.

A millimeter-wave imaging scanner looks like a round phone booth. It uses a part of the electromagnetic spectrum called millimeter waves. These waves lie just to the right of microwaves, which means they carry a little more energy than microwaves do. But they have less energy than infrared waves.

Millimeter-wave machines would scan passengers using a part of the electromagnetic spectrum (illustrated) that sits between microwaves and infrared. See the full video.

NASA, Teachers’ Domain

When a person steps inside a millimeter-wave imaging scanner, two 7-foot long beams of millimeter waves scan his body from head to toe. These waves pass through fabric, but they bounce off the water in our skin and in liquids that people might be trying to sneak onboard. (Some explosives start out as liquids). Millimeter waves also ping off plastic, paper, ceramics, even little nuggets of gum.

A computer inside the scanner detects the reflections and turns them into a three-dimensional image that pops up on a screen. The picture shows the outline of a passenger’s figure and everything he’s carrying under his clothes or in his pockets. Workers survey the image for suspicious objects.

“They’re going to detect threats that metal detectors don’t get,” says McMakin, who researches millimeter-wave machines. “The eyes will go to things that shouldn’t be there.”

The system is quick, and getting quicker. With modern computers, McMakin says, a scan takes about a second and a half. A visible image shows up just two or three seconds after that. As computers get even faster and cheaper, the equipment is becoming increasingly practical.

Millimeter-wave technology is also safe. It uses 10,000 times less power than a cell phone does. And millimeter waves have too little energy to harm human health.

Backscatter

In a sort of technological face-off, millimeter-wave scanners are going head-to-head with backscatter scanners. Instead of using millimeter waves, backscatter devices employ X-rays. These are the same waves that machines at hospitals use to penetrate flesh and look for broken bones.

Because they use the higher-energy X-rays, backscatter scanners produce images that are more detailed than millimeter-wave machines spit out. Some people think the images are clearer and make unusual objects easier to identify.

For now, backscatter scanners are a little slower than millimeter-wave scanners, McMakin says. The technology has also raised some health concerns. X-rays produce a type of radiation that can, in some cases, damage human cells and cause cancer.

Despite the rumors, however, even backscatter machines are safe, says medical physicist James Hevezi, chair of the American College of Radiation Medical Physics Commission. One scan, he says, delivers the same amount of radiation as spending two minutes in an airplane at 30,000 feet.

In other words, the machines are far safer than flying is.

“It really is not a health concern,” Hevezi says. “It is a much lower dose than anything used in medicine.”

Perhaps a bigger concern is privacy, and that applies to both systems. In addition to showing slips of paper in pockets and explosives in underwear, scanners reveal every curve of a passenger’s body.

Some day, computers might be able to read the scans on their own without the help of human eyes, making this worry irrelevant. In the meantime, Hevezi, says, people will have to compare the benefits of scanning technology with the potential risks of flying without its help.

“The benefit is safety in the air when we travel,” he says. “If people want to travel in modes other than air travel, they can do it that way. Or they can ask to be patted down instead. There are still some choices we can make.”

Toward the horizon

As engineers continue to tinker on imaging technologies, their discoveries are fueling industries that have nothing to do with security. A company called Intellifit, for example, is using millimeter-wave scanners to help people buy jeans.

In less than 15 seconds, the machine spits out precise body measurements that can be used to design custom-made clothing. Scanners could also help dieters take body measurements to see whether they are getting slimmer. Scanners are already being used for these reasons in a few places.

As for security, advances in science should make air travel safer and safer, experts say.

“We’re just at the start of where we could go,” McMakin says, “and what it could be.”

TEACHER’S QUESTIONS

Here are questions related to this article.

A stomachache was not how Smith wanted to start vacation. “I was hoping I would get better,” she says, “So I could go ski.”

As the day progressed, things worsened. A sharp pain developed in her lower right side. She couldn’t swallow the soup her sister warmed up for her at lunchtime. By the time she saw a doctor later that afternoon, she was hunched over in pain.

When she learned that her appendix was infected, she didn’t have much time to be afraid. She was rushed into surgery. The next morning, her appendix was gone.

“It was a little scary because it happened so quickly,” says Smith, now an evolutionary biologist at the Arizona College of Osteopathic Medicine at Midwestern University in Glendale, Ariz. But she has never missed her long-lost organ. In fact, the emergency left her with a lifelong fascination for a body part she no longer has.

“I have always been interested in the appendix and trying to figure out why we have one,” Smith says. “There’s been this idea for so long that it didn’t do anything.”

Appendices have long been considered “vestigial structures.” That means we don’t actually need them. The brain, heart, skin and most other organs are essential for survival. But you can live a long life without an appendix. The same goes for tonsils, wisdom teeth, body hair and other vestigial structures.

At best, according to traditional thinking, vestigial structures just take up space. At worst, they can get infected and cause all sorts of trouble. So why do we have these unnecessary body parts in the first place?

Growing evidence suggests that we have them because they aren’t actually unnecessary at all. Their function probably depends on where you live (and perhaps when you lived). In some parts of the world, people still need vestigial body parts. Studying where and when these features are or were useful is helping scientists make new advances in modern medicine. The work is also providing insight into the history of humankind — telling scientists things about our ancestors that we didn’t know before.

“It may be the case with a lot of unnecessary body parts that they may have had a function in the past but we don’t necessarily need that function anymore,” says Smith, who ended up studying the appendix sort of by accident. “That can give us insights.”

The hidden point

The appendix is a small organ that looks like a little worm (lower left of image). It doesn’t lead anywhere, but may serve as a haven for good bacteria.

3drenderings/iStockphoto

Consider your body, and you’ll notice a hodgepodge of random features that might seem silly when you stop to think about them. What’s the point of fingernails, for example? Why is there hair on your toes? And what’s the deal with muscles in your ears? Do we really need muscles in our ears?

Throughout history, scientists, too, have wondered about structures that don’t seem to do anything useful. The appendix is a popular example. This little, worm-like pouch is about four inches long and less than half an inch wide.

The organ grows near where the long intestine meets the short intestine. The intestines are essential for digestion, but the appendix appears to just sit there.

“It’s a dead-end sack,” says William Parker, an immunologist at Duke University in Durham, N.C. “It doesn’t go anywhere.”

Parker didn’t start out intending to study the appendix. His specialty is the immune system — a collection of organs, cells and molecules that our bodies use to stay healthy. But his research led him to the appendix anyway.

Parker knew that the human body is full of tiny organisms called bacteria, which can overwhelm the immune system, cause infections and make a person sick. He also knew that some bacteria are good for human health. Among other benefits, these “good” bacteria help people digest food and fight off “bad” bacteria that cause disease.

The immune system doesn’t just benefit from good bacteria, though. In the 1990s, Parker and colleagues began to figure out that the immune system also helps good bacteria flourish. These bacteria appear in thin layers called biofilms, which grow on the side of the gut near and inside the appendix. These biofilms, the researchers learned, provide a barrier that keep out bad bacteria.

“Once we figured that out, it should have been obvious to us what the appendix did,” says Parker, whose team also found that the appendix has a particularly robust biofilm. “It’s in the perfect spot to harbor bacteria — out of the flow and with a thin, narrow opening. And there’s a large amount of immune tissue associated with it.”

After stumbling on a possible link between the immune system and the appendix, though, the scientists still had some clues to compile before being sure of the organ’s purpose.

Hangout for good bacteria

In 2007, Parker’s team put together all the evidence they had gathered and came up with a conclusion: The appendix serves as a “safe house,” Parker says, a storage bin for good bacteria. If bad bacteria attack, good bacteria emerge from the appendix and come to the rescue.

Having a safe space for good bacteria should be especially useful in parts of the world that are poor and undeveloped — places where people are starving, medicine is hard to come by, clean water is scarce and diarrhea can kill. In those places, Parker says, the appendix probably helps keep people alive, especially young children.

In fact, people in the developing world rarely get infected appendixes, like Smith’s. Most cases of appendicitis, in fact, occur in the United States and other developed countries, where water is purified, hospitals are sterilized and medical care is easier to get.

Those trends suggest that the appendix evolved in our ancestors to maintain health in a bacteria-filled world. Today, places such as the United States might be too sterile for the appendix. When the organ has nothing do, the immune system can turn on itself, sending people to the emergency room, Parker says. Other problems, such as allergies and immune diseases, might have similar roots.

Even in ultra-clean societies, then, the appendix and other vestigial organs might be unrecognized heroes.

“Just because body parts don’t seem to have any usefulness here doesn’t mean you wouldn’t need them if you were suddenly thrown in the middle of the woods somewhere and had to drink from whatever mud hole you could find nearby and you had to run away from predators,” Parker says. “Problems we are having today with allergies and autoimmune diseases are a result of the body not really fitting in with our culture.”

Figuring out the true purpose of the appendix and other overlooked organs, Parker adds, is an important step toward solving medical mysteries.

“We want to understand how the body functions so we can work towards getting it to function normally,” he says.

To do that, it can help to take an historical view. By considering what was normal a long time ago and comparing the old normal to the new normal, researchers can see how evolution has shaped our bodies over hundreds of thousands of years. That process of change over time is called evolution.

“The best way to figure out how the body was designed to work,” Parker says, “is to look at how it was meant to work over hundreds of millions of years of evolution.”

Wise beyond our years

The appendix isn’t the only example of a body part with hidden powers. Wisdom teeth are another. This final set of molars usually grows in at around age 20. Today, most people get their wisdom teeth removed before the bulky molars can squeeze other teeth out of place or get infected.

Millions of years ago, though, human faces weren’t as flat as they are today and mouths had more room for wisdom teeth. After 20 years of life without dental care, our ancestors would have benefited from a fresh set of strong teeth that could chew and grind raw food.

Our ancestors may have found wisdom teeth more useful than we do.

Lakhesis/iStockphoto

As for other structures long thought to be pointless, a recent study found that the spleen stores a whole lot of immune cells. Among other roles, those cells help to repair hearts that are damaged. Tonsils, which are also removed routinely in many developed countries, probably help boost the immune system, as well, Parker says.

As they continue to find purposes for seemingly purposeless body parts, scientists are connecting our present with the past. They are also connecting the human animal with other animals on Earth.

Last year, Smith teamed up with Parker and other colleagues to look at a whole bunch of mammal species, some that lived tens of millions of years ago. The researchers found that the appendix has existed in a wide range of animals, from rodents to primates to Australian marsupials. The study also revealed that the appendix evolved more than once throughout history. Both findings suggest that the appendix has had an important purpose throughout time.

By looking closely at our body’s “pointless” parts, we can begin to imagine what our bodies used to be able to do. Recognizing the body’s lingering power could also open up a whole new future of possibilities.

“Our evolution gives our bodies a lot of resilience and strength we really don’t need very much in our society,” says Parker. “I sit around in my office and have all the food I want. My body can do so many things I never ask it to do.”

This story and other Science News for Kids features describing research in medicine and biology are supported with funding from The Lasker Foundation. The foundation and its programs are dedicated to the support of biomedical research toward conquering disease, improving human health and extending life.

Thousands of years ago, though, only babies drank milk — and that milk came from their mothers. Now, scientists are investigating the beginnings of mankind’s long-lasting love for daily products. They are looking back thousands of years, to the days when people first squeezed milk out of cows and other animals for use as food and drink.

Tracking down the first milk drinkers could give insight into some bigger questions. For example, why do so many people today still get sick from drinking milk? In some countries, almost nobody can digest dairy products.

The work could also help explain major events in human history. Before refrigerators and grocery stores kept a steady supply of fresh food around, dairying probably transformed societies.

“If you can have an animal supply nutrition without killing it, that’s a real step in agriculture,” says Richard Evershed, a chemist at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom. “That’s spectacular in terms of human nutrition.”

As easy as milk is to find these days, though, its history is challenging to piece together. Like detectives, researchers are tackling the milk mystery in more ways than one.

They are analyzing ancient milk scum on extremely old pots. They’re tracking down the genes that allowed people to digest milk, which is surprisingly hard for many people to stomach. They’re even looking for clues in the buried bones of cows, sheep, horses and other milk-making animals.

“Milk was probably the world’s first superfood,” says Mark Thomas, a scientist at University College London who studies how genes have changed throughout history. The advantages of being able to drink it, he adds, “are just out of this world.”

Thanks, moms

To most people, milk comes in a carton. But milk originally comes from the bodies of mammals. Human as well as other mammal mothers, including dogs, cats, pigs and mice, produce milk to feed their babies.

Mammal babies, including goats, get milk from their mothers. Human mothers also provide milk to their very young children, but most people get milk from the store.

isaact/iStockphoto

Most of the milk in U.S. grocery stores comes from cows. In other countries, it is common to drink the milk of sheep, goats, camels, even horses. Each type of milk has a different flavor. Some types are easier to stomach than others.

Evershed recently sampled milk from horses in Kazakhstan. “It was the most disgusting drink I’ve ever tasted,” he says. “I just didn’t like it.”

Unlike meat, milk does not require that an animal be slaughtered. But the first dairy farmers had to figure out for themselves how to turn wild animals into ones that could be raised in captivity. Then, they needed to herd the animals, care for them and continue to milk them even after the animals’ babies grew up.

Another complication: Milk drinking doesn’t come naturally to older kids and adults. Milk contains a type of sugar called lactose. In order to turn lactose into energy, our bodies need an enzyme called lactase. Enzymes are proteins that help the body do its work.

Like other newborn mammals, baby humans have plenty of lactase, which allows them to gulp down their mothers’ milk. After age 2 or so, though, lactase levels drop.

Without lactase, people can get very sick from dairy products. Symptoms include gas, stomach cramps and severe diarrhea. The condition is called lactose intolerance.

None of our early ancestors could digest milk as adults because their bodies never had to — milk drinking simply wasn’t an option. As people began to extract milk from animals, though, some people developed the ability to keep drinking it throughout their lives.

That biological switch proved to be a huge boost toward survival. Milk is full of calories, fat, protein, calcium and other nutrients. For ancient man, it would have been a valuable and steady source of food.

Scientists now know of a milk-related mutation in our genes — the chemical instructions for life that we carry in almost every cell in our bodies. People who have a mutated form of one particular gene can drink milk just fine. People without the mutation tend to get sick from milk.

“The ability to digest milk, Thomas says, “has been incredibly important for people’s survival for the last 8,000 to 10,000 years. We still just don’t know why.”

The first milk drinkers

To figure out where, and possibly why, milk drinking started, some scientists have been looking at who has the milk-digesting mutation today. Patterns are striking.

Most adults in Northern and Central Europe are able to digest milk — and they do. Cheese, butter and other dairy products are popular in countries such as Sweden, Denmark, Germany and England. Because European settlers dominated North America, most people here can handle milk just fine, as well. That may explain why ice cream is such a popular dessert in the United States.

In much of Africa, Asia and South America, on the other hand, people tend to avoid dairy products because they lead to diarrhea and other stomach problems. (That’s why you won’t typically find cheese on the menu at a Chinese, Japanese or Ethiopian restaurant.) Native Americans are also unable to digest lactose.

Based on these genetic patterns, scientists have long thought that milk drinking started in Northern Europe, where dairy is an institution and the milk-digesting mutation is everywhere.

The different circles of color on this map of Europe show where lactose tolerance—the ability for older children and adults to drink milk without it causing illness or discomfort—developed in a particular area. The red area in the center shows w

Yuval Itan, Adam Powell, Mark G. Thomas

A recent study painted a different picture. With a computer model, Thomas and colleagues looked at the spread of the milk-drinking mutation, farming and other related factors. Working backward, the scientists concluded that the first milk-drinkers lived in Central Europe around what’s now Hungary about 7,500 years ago. The practice didn’t start farther north, as scientists had thought before.

Around that time, a farming culture called the Linearbandkeramik also sprouted in the area that’s now Hungary. The culture spread quickly over the next few hundred years into most of northwestern Europe.

Milk drinking, Thomas says, was probably responsible for the success of the Linearbandkeramik. And milk-drinking Linearbandkeramik may have transformed Europe.

“They probably shaped the language and cultural map of Northern Europe over the last several thousand years,” Thomas says. “We now think the ability to digest milk was crucial to [their] spread.”

Dairy before milk

The story doesn’t start or end there. It’s now clear that people ate dairy foods before they actually drank milk.

Over the last decade, Evershed has analyzed pottery remains from many hundreds of ancient vessels at dozens of sites in Europe.

His group has also identified dried-up milk fat on the oldest pottery shards ever found, dating back 9,000 years from an area outside Europe, in the Middle East, called the Fertile Crescent. The region now includes Iraq, Syria and Israel. It’s probably where people first domesticated animals.

In fact, milking may have started even earlier than that. Although archaeologists haven’t found older pottery remains, scientists do have evidence that early sheep herds were mostly female. That might mean that the herd was used for milk, rather than meat. It’s the females, after all, that produce milk.

Despite those clues, Thomas — who has pulled genetic material out of the bones of early European farmers — has found no sign that people had the gene mutation for digesting lactose before 7,500 years ago.

So, why were people milking animals if they couldn’t digest the milk?

It turns out that fermenting and processing milk into yogurt, cheese and other products removes much of the lactose. Even people who are lactose-intolerant can often eat these foods without getting sick.

Dairy foods last longer than milk without spoiling. And fermenting, for instance, is not hard to do: In a hot country, people would have just needed to leave milk in a pot outside for most of the day to turn the milk into a nutritious, digestible yogurt.

“We are now pretty convinced,” Thomas says, “that the ability to digest milk came after the skills necessary to produce it.”

From when and where, to why?

Now that scientists know more about when and where milking started, they are struggling to explain why people started drinking milk in the first place.

Among a variety of theories about milk, Thomas likes the idea that animals provide a steady supply of it. Crops boom and then bust. Meat comes with finality: the end of an animal’s life. But on the other hand, as long as you keep feeding and milking a cow, her milk keeps coming.

There would have been other advantages, too. Milk is cheap. It’s nutritious. And it harbors fewer dangerous bacteria compared with liquids like river water, which could have made people terribly sick.

Investigating milk, scientists say, is a great way to help people connect with their food and where it comes from. In a recent presentation for schoolkids, Evershed included a poster of someone squeezing milk from the udders of a cow into a pot.

“It was a lovely picture,” Evershed says, and the image was symbolic, too. “It brought home man’s intimate relationship with animals and the way we live with them and rely on them. The supermarket makes you forget that.”

Going Deeper:

Dee Boersma studies conservation biology and has focused on seabirds as indicators of environmental change. Recently appointed to the Wadsworth Endowed Chair in Conservation Science at the University of Washington in Seattle, Boersma has studied penguins for more than 20 years at the Punta Tombo reserve in Argentina. Credit: Courtesy of Dee Boersma, The Penguin Sentinels

Dee Boersma was studying penguins in Argentina when a local official announced a new plan.

“He wanted to build a boardwalk over 197 [penguin] nests right before hatching,” says Boersma, a conservation scientist at the University of Washington, Seattle. She knew the project would scare the birds and harm their babies. “That was upsetting to me and to others.”

Boersma snapped into action. First, she hid the lumber for the project, so construction couldn’t begin, even though she knew she might get in trouble for interfering. Then, she battled lawyers and the governor. After all, she had already spent more than 20 years fighting for penguins (you can read about her work at www.penguinsentinels.org). She wasn’t about to give up now.

“There are an awful lot of ways we can make it possible for these organisms to live longer,” says Boersma, who had to pay fines for her interference but eventually won this particular battle. After nine long months, the official was fired. The boardwalk plan was scrapped. And a road into the fragile area was closed. “We need to continue to be vigilant.”

Penguins need that kind of attention because many of them are in trouble. Of the world’s 19 types of penguin species, 14 are classified as threatened or endangered, meaning that their numbers are low enough to make scientists worry about the species’ long-term survival. Even those that are doing OK face an uncertain future. The presence of people is one problem. Climate change is another.

An unusual ambassador

Magellanic penguins bathe and socialize on the beaches. Credit: Courtesy of Dee Boersma, The Penguin Sentinels

Penguins are not your typical birds. For one thing, they can’t fly. Instead, these spunky creatures spend some of their time on land and ice, where they waddle and tummy-slide. They spend the rest of their time in water, where they swim with surprising speed and grace. Penguins live mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, from New Zealand to South America to Antarctica.

Oh, and they’re cute—really, really cute. With their big round tummies, stubby wings, silly way of shuffling along, and a color pattern that looks like a tuxedo, penguins have a way of getting under your skin.

On a trip to Australia, I once watched as swarms of Little Penguins (the smallest species of penguin at just over a foot tall) popped out of the water, speed-waddled across the beach, and hopped into burrows in the sand. I had to fight the urge to pick one up and bring it home with me.

“Everybody gets charmed by them once they’ve had any kind of interaction with them,” says Gerald Kooyman, a marine biologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif. “That’s one of their strong points as ambassadors to the environment.”

In other words, penguins are so delightful, they can draw our attention to problems that face many other kinds of plants and animals as well. The number of people on Earth, for one thing, keeps going up. Our shopping malls, neighborhoods and roads are rapidly destroying the habitats where wild animals live. Pesticides, industrial chemicals and other sources of pollution get into the environment and make animals sick.

Global warming, too, is causing troubles in a whole bunch of ways. In general, a rise in heat-trapping gases in the Earth’s atmosphere is making both the air and the oceans warmer. Unlike humans, animals can’t just change their outfits or go inside and turn on the air conditioning when weather turns sour. Instead, changes to their environment can make it harder for them to find food, reproduce or even survive.

One day of rain at the usually dry Punta Tombo reserve can be devastating to the reproductive success of the Magellanic penguin colony for the season. The sudden onset of a rain storm floods nests (burrow nests can collapse) and kills any chicks or eggs inside of it. One storm hit in early December 2008, killing approximately 16 percent of chicks that were hatched at that time. Credit: Courtesy of Dee Boersma, The Penguin Sentinels

As our planet continues to get warmer, scientists are also noticing shifts in winds and currents. Even more complicated, climate is becoming increasingly variable. That means lower low temperatures, higher highs, and more surprises. These are all things that can put a lot of stress on animals, including penguins.

“There are severe changes going on,” Boersma says. “Penguins are doing everything in their ecological power to try to adapt to climate change. But it’s coming fast, and we’re already seeing impacts.”

For better or worse

Some types of penguins are doing worse than others.

In Argentina, the world’s largest population of Magellanic penguins lives within a protected reserve called Punta Tombo. That’s where Boersma works. But in the last few decades, the scientists have seen the population at Punta Tombo drop from 350,000 pairs to 200,000 pairs. (These birds have a tendency to couple up).

For the penguins that remain at the site, studies show, life is harder than it used to be. One reason is that their food—small fish and squid—have moved further north, as a result of climate change. So, the birds now have to swim an average of 37 miles farther, each way, to find food to bring back to their chicks. Thirty-seven miles is a long way for a bird to swim. Consequences can be disastrous.

A Magellanic adult penguin with three chicks. The adult penguin is wearing a satellite tag (look for the antenna sticking up).The transmitter is attached with epoxy and special tape. The tags are about the size of many cell phones and weigh less than 3.5 ounces. Scientists tagged the penguins to follow the birds' migration south to the breeding colonies. The work is part of a larger effort to better understand penguin biology, with an aim of protecting the charismatic creatures. Credit: Courtesy of Dee Boersma, The Penguin Sentinels

“If you go a long way and you don’t get back in time,” Boersma says, “your young starve.”

Penguins that live near the South Pole face their own problems. Emperor penguins, for instance, breed on the ice. After the moms lay their eggs, they travel to the open sea, where they spend two months feeding. All the while, the fathers keep the eggs warm without eating a single bite.

It’s an exhausting process. Studies show that their lifestyle makes this species highly sensitive to shifts in climate. Just a small environmental change—in temperature or rainfall, say—in any direction can make it harder for the birds to find food. Unfortunately for them, climate is changing particularly fast near the Earth’s poles.

Antarctica’s king penguins are actually doing fine right now, but even for them, there are signs that trouble is brewing. One 2008 study found that warmer water leads to fewer squid, fish and other creatures that the penguins eat.

As hard as penguins may try, these birds can’t always find ways to cope with the changes happening around them. Some of Punta Tombo’s penguin pairs have moved more than 100 miles north in pursuit of food. But their new homes lie on built-up areas and private land, where safety is not guaranteed.

Not all penguins have the option of moving to greener pastures when conditions decline. The penguins that live in the Galapagos Islands, for one, live hundreds of miles from other bodies of land. When things get bad, they have nowhere else to go.

Race against time

Despite the growing list of concerns, not all penguin news is bad news.

Some species continue to thrive, including king penguins and certain populations of Adélie penguins. Even amongst troubled species, some populations are better off than they used to be.

In the 1980s, Boersma says, there were years when 80 percent of dead Magellanic penguins found on the beach in Punta Tombo were completely drenched in oil. Since then, officials have cracked down on illegal oil dumping. Today, that problem has mostly disappeared.

“You really can have an influence when you want to solve these problems,” Boersma says. “Humans are good at sometimes changing and reducing their impacts on species.”

As efforts to protect penguins continue, scientists are racing to learn more about these charismatic birds. Penguins spend as much as 80 percent of their lives at sea, where they perform impressive physical feats. Some species dive as deep as 2,000 feet. Some swim hundreds of miles each year. But most studies have focused on what the birds do when they’re above the surface.

In recent years, researchers have begun to attach tracking devices to penguins to learn where the birds go and what they do when they’re underwater. The results are revealing new details about both penguins and the environment.

“Penguins can be used to essentially map those parts of the oceans that they frequent,” says Lloyd Spencer Davis, a penguin filmmaker, author and scientist at the University of Otago in New Zealand. “Also, by monitoring how easily or difficult they find it to get food, they can be used as a check on the health of the seas.”

The more we learn about penguins, he adds, the more hope we have for keeping them alive.

“We are responsible for the penguins’ current woes,” Davis says. “But we can be their saviors, too.”

Going Deeper:

Questions about the article

Word Find: Penguins, Penguins

After they’re diagnosed and for the rest of their lives, type 1 diabetics need to regularly test their blood sugar levels with a pinching tool that draws a little blood. They also have to give themselves shots of insulin several times a day to contro

When she was 9 years old, Ann Albright went to the doctor with odd flulike symptoms. She was exhausted. She had to go to the bathroom frequently in the middle of the night. She was always thirsty. Even her vision was blurry.

After a few tests, the doctor pulled Albright’s mother aside.

“I still remember it very vividly,” says Ann Albright, now more than 40 years later. “My mom left the room with the doctor and came back in with tears running down her cheeks.”

The verdict: diabetes, a disease that affects the way people process food.

At the time, the 1960s, the diagnosis meant that young Ann would never have the carefree childhood her mother wanted for her. For the rest of her life, she would have to give herself shots several times a day. She would need to be very careful about what she ate. And she might not realize all of her dreams in life.

“In the era I was diagnosed, most people were told they’d have a shorter life span,” Albright says. “As a little girl with diabetes moving into adulthood, I wondered would I be able to have kids? Would I be able to have a life?”

Science has come a long way since then, says Albright, partly as a result of her own efforts: She’s now a doctor and diabetes researcher at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. Since her diagnosis, researchers have developed better technologies, more effective medicines and a sharper understanding of how diabetes works.

Despite the advances, though, scientists still can’t answer a lot of basic questions about what causes diabetes. There still is no cure. And living with the disease remains difficult.

“Everything changes” after a diabetes diagnosis, says Ali Reed, a pediatric endocrine fellow at the University of California, San Francisco. “Life becomes more complicated.”

What’s more, diabetes is on the rise — in both adults and kids. One version of the disease, called type 2 diabetes, is increasing at an especially alarming rate.

Scientists have linked type 2 diabetes with obesity. So now, more than ever, doctors are urging young people to start developing healthy habits as early as possible.

Breakdown

Diabetes refers to a group of diseases, but there are two main kinds: type 1 and type 2. In both types, the trouble begins with the body’s ability to deal with sugar.

Sugar is the body’s main fuel source. When you eat, your digestive system breaks down your food into basic parts, including proteins, fats and a simple sugar called glucose. Glucose gets absorbed through the intestines. From there, it enters the bloodstream. Circulating blood delivers glucose to all the cells, which convert it into energy.

At least, that’s what’s supposed to happen. In people with diabetes, however, sugar can’t get from the bloodstream into the cells. A hormone, or messenger molecule, called insulin is normally responsible for that transfer. But in diabetics, insulin doesn’t do its job.

As a result, sugar builds up in the bloodstream. When levels of sugar in the blood stay high, the condition is called chronic. And for reasons scientists don’t yet understand, chronically high blood sugar can lead to blindness, kidney damage, limb amputations, heart attacks and more.

“It’s not a death sentence, but it’s a very serious disease,” Albright says.

Two types

Exactly how diabetes affects a patient’s life depends in part on which type of diabetes a person has. There are important differences between the two main types.

Type 1 diabetes is the kind Albright has. In this version of the disease, the body stops producing insulin. Symptoms usually begin in kids or teenagers.

After they’re diagnosed and for the rest of their lives, type 1 diabetics need to regularly test their blood sugar levels with a pinching tool that draws a little blood. They also have to give themselves shots of insulin several times a day to control blood sugar levels. So far, scientists don’t know how to prevent type 1 diabetes.

Type 2 diabetics make insulin, but their bodies don’t use the hormone properly. Type 2 diabetes is far more common than type 1, and most people who have type 2 are adults. These days, though, more and more kids are coming to their doctors with symptoms of type 2 diabetes.

Doctors already know that adults who develop type 2 diabetes tend to be overweight or obese. And as kids have become increasingly overweight, the disease has started appearing at younger and younger ages.

Shorrocks/iStockphoto

As recently as a decade ago, type 2 diabetes was called “adult-onset” because kids just didn’t get it.

“When this disease we used to only see in adults started happening in adolescents, it was just shocking to people,” Albright says. “Pediatricians just didn’t know what to do.”

Healthy living

Doctors already knew that adults who develop type 2 diabetes tend to be overweight or obese. (Scientists can’t yet explain why.) And as kids have become increasingly overweight, the disease has started appearing at younger and younger ages.

In the United States, two out of three adults are now overweight, according to the CDC. Nineteen percent of kids between the ages of 6 and 11 are overweight, compared with 7 percent just 20 years ago. Over the same period, the proportion of overweight teens rose from 5 percent to 17 percent.

(You can find out whether you are overweight by plugging numbers into a calculator at an online site. Also, see the sidebar “Understanding Body Mass Index” at the bottom of this article.)

Like their type 1 peers, type 2 diabetics have to monitor blood sugar levels. But they often rely on drugs instead of insulin shots. Frequently, they can get the disease under control by simply exercising more and eating reasonable portions of healthy foods.

“We now know that we can prevent or postpone type 2 diabetes by having [adults] at very high risk lose 5 to 7 percent of their body weight,” Albright says.

Scientists don’t yet know whether the same is true for overweight kids. The trend is so new that CDC researchers are still working to gather basic information about how the disease works in young people.

But it can’t hurt to play soccer instead of video games, and to choose fruits and vegetables over junk food.

“There’s no harm in having healthier lifestyle habits,” Albright says. “Get to know what’s going into your body. Make it fun.”

Seeking answers

Weighing more than you should doesn’t mean you’re doomed to develop diabetes. The disease is far more complex than that. And while research has come a long way, plenty of questions remain.

Doctors don’t know, for example, why certain ethnic groups have particularly high rates of diabetes, including American Indians, Hispanics and African Americans. Nor can doctors say for sure why the chances of getting diabetes go up if your parents or siblings have it.

Both relationships suggest that genes play a role in setting people up for diabetes. But something in the environment has to push those genes into action, and scientists aren’t sure what those triggers are. It’s also not clear which genes are involved.

“People spend their whole careers trying to understand this stuff,” Albright says.

If you learn you have diabetes, don’t despair. There’s plenty you can do to live a long and healthy life. Also, know you’re not alone.

Reed encourages all newly diagnosed kids to go to one of the nation’s many diabetes camps. It can be hugely reassuring, she says, to be surrounded by other kids who feel like you do.

“It’s really amazing,” Reed says. “It’s a very supportive and tolerating environment for kids who are often the only ones at their school with diabetes. At diabetes camp, everyone is going through it together.”

Going Deeper: