Neil Gorsuch Hearings, The Bad Kids, Space Junk

Guest: Amy Wildermuth, JD, Professor of Law, University of Utah Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch is Top of Mind today. With the customary grilling of the nominee over and a vote by the full Senate expected next week, we’ve rung up Supreme Court expert and University of Utah law professor Amy Wildermuth for some analysis.

Guest: Gary Cohen, Founder and Board Chair, Together for Girls, Senior Executive for Global Health and Development, Becton Dickinson This next conversation may not be appropriate for young listeners. We’re going to speak with the founder of an international nonprofit called Together for Girls, which leans heavily on the power of data to address the problem of sexual violence against girls. While such violence is universally condemned as a violation of human rights with devastating consequences, it’s also far more common than people realize. That realization is what prompted Gary Cohen to found Together for Girls.

Guest: Vonda Veeland, Black Rock HS Principal, Subject of the Documentary “The Bad Kids”  Remember the bad kids in high school? The ones who talked backed to the teacher and disrupted class? That is, if they came to class at all. They partied hard, fell into drugs, got pregnant, dropped out or simply disappeared.  Vonda Viland knows all about the bad kids. She is the principal at Black Rock High School, and when it comes to kids acting out, she’s seen it all. But she is not discouraged. In fact, her optimism about the future for the kids at her school is the subject of a new documentary called “The Bad Kids.” The movie is streaming now until April 15 at pbs.org. To donate to the school's fund click here.

Guest: Greg Crane, CEO and Founder of the ALICE Training Institute Columbine, Virginia Tech and Newtown are tragic and well-known school shootings. But a tally of news and police reports by the advocacy group Every Town for Gun Safety shows that since 2013, there’s been an average of nearly one instance a week of a gun fired on school property somewhere in America. Thankfully, most of those instances have not ended in mass casualties. Still, responding to an active shooter is now on the list of things school officials and students are expected to prepare for – along with earthquakes and fire. Many are turning to a training called “ALICE,” that is somewhat controversial because it teaches students and teachers to fight back, rather than just hunker down and hope to survive.

Guest: Don Kessler, retired NASA Senior Scientist, Chairman of National Research Council Committee for the Assessment of NASA’s Orbital Debris Programs If you’ve ever gotten a chip in your windshield from a pebble on the freeway, you know the danger of high speed. So imagine the damage even a paint flake can do hurtling through space at seven times the speed of a bullet. A window on the International Space Station recently got a small crater from what was probably just that – a tiny flake of paint that came off a satellite or rocket. Earth’s orbit has become increasingly hazardous in the 50 years people have been sending stuff up there. Tens of thousands of pieces of debris are floating around up there, colliding to create even more debris, which pose a threat to the space station, shuttles carrying astronauts and satellites with important work to do.

Guest: Anupam Jena, MD, Association Professor of Health Care Policy, Harvard Medical School, Physician in the Department of Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital Next time you end up in the hospital, you might want to hope your doctor is a woman. Hospital patients who are treated by female doctors have a better chance of survival than those treated by male doctors. That’s the conclusion of an analysis published in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine that looked at more than a million and a half Medicare patients who were hospitalized. Here’s one way of looking at the difference: if all Medicare patients in the hospital were treated by female doctors, there would be 32,000 fewer patient deaths every year.