Judge Kavanaugh, School Lunches, Reviving Hearts

Guest:  Kimberly Robinson, Supreme Court reporter, Bloomberg Law Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh is Top of Mind today as his confirmation hearing gets underway. Day One featured lots of arguing between Republicans and Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee about whether they had enough information about Judge Kavanaugh to even hold the hearing. Questioning of the Supreme Court nominee will begin Wednesday and last for several days.

Guest: Jay Hoffman, PhD, full professor in the Sport and Exercise Science program at the University of Central Florida Every diet deals with the basic building blocks of nutrition – protein, carbohydrate, fat. But protein usually gets the starring role. There’s a lot of confusion, though, about how much protein is ideal for a body and where that protein should come from.

Guest: Crystal FitzSimons, Director of School and Out-of-School Time Programs, Food Research and Action Center  What are schools to do about the families who run up a school lunch tab and never pay? Do you refuse to feed the kid? Make him eat a cheese sandwich instead of the more expensive hot meal? Public outcry over such “lunch shaming” as it’s been called, has led to districts in many states implementing universal school lunch policies, where kids get fed no matter what. But that can run up a pretty big tab, too.

Guest: Hannah Schacter, National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Research fellow at the University of Southern California Teenagers are back to school – which is exciting for them, but scary for parents who know how prone kids can be toward cliques and cruelty. How can parents and schools encourage teenagers to think it’s cool to be kind, rather than catty?

Guest: James McCully, PhD, Associate Professor of Surgery at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School What if, instead of doing a heart transplant, surgeons could coax a patient’s failing heart to repair and revive itself? Harvard heart researcher James McCully is part of a team that’s had success with this in pigs and in human babies. Tests on adult hearts are in the works.

Guest: Rachel Wadham, Education and Juvenile Collections Librarian, Brigham Young University