Photo, above: 2012VP113 is a detached trans-Neptunian object. ("A frozen pink world has been found, orbiting far beyond the orbit of Pluto. Until now, the lone known resident in this part of the solar system was an oddball dwarf planet spotted in 2003 named Sedna after the mythological Inuit goddess who created the sea creatures of the Arctic.")

Its discovery was announced on 26 March 2014.  Astronomers have detected a small world (inset) more than twice as remote as Pluto, lying 12 billion kilometers, or 83 AU, from the sun. (One AU, or astronomical unit, is the mean sun-Earth distance.) As scientists report online today in Nature, the new object is the first ever found whose orbit (red curve) resembles that of Sedna (orange curve), a far-off body that never gets close to Neptune's path (outermost magenta circle). Both Sedna and the new world, designated 2012 VP113, therefore differ from Pluto and other members of the Edgeworth-Kuiper belt (turquoise dots), which lie just past Neptune's orbit. The object journeys 80 to 452 AU from the sun, never approaching Neptune (30 AU) or Pluto (39.5 AU). The new world is roughly 450 kilometers across, just one-fifth Pluto's diameter. If Pluto were as big as a basketball, Sedna would be a softball and the new world a mere golf ball. Whereas Pluto orbits the sun every 248 years, the new world requires 4340 years and Sedna 12,600 years to do the same. Both Sedna and its small sidekick probably belong to the inner part of the Oort cloud, the frigid reservoir of long-period comets that can dazzle us when they dash toward the sun, and suggest that many other far-flung objects await discovery.  (Picture: Scott S. Sheppard: Carnegie Institution for Science)

JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW

Hour One

Friday  28 March  2014 / Hour 1, Block A: Harry Siegel, New York Daily News, OPINION; in re: The American Dream meets the robot future

Friday  28 March  2014 / Hour 1, Block B:   Henry I Miller, M.D., Hoover & Forbes.com, in re: "A Better Apple Awaits, but Regulators Won't Allow Us a Bite," co-authored with Rob Wager.

Friday  28 March  2014 / Hour 1, Block C: Megan McCloskey, ProPublica, in re: French, Germans Return Fallen GI After Pentagon Gives Up

  U.S. Army PFC Lawrence S. Gordon -- killed in Normandy in 1944, then mistakenly buried as a German solder -- is finally going home to his family, no thanks to the government agency enlisted with identifying our country's missing in action servicemen.

The Joint Prisoners of War/Missing in Action Accounting Command, or J-PAC, had declined to act on Gordon's case despite exhaustive research by civilian investigators that pointed to the location of his remains. ProPublica obtained a previously undisclosed J-PAC memo from April 2013 that, for the first time, reveals the agency's rationale for turning aside his family's entreaties. One J-PAC historian advised "extreme caution" on the case, saying that . . . (1 of 2)

Friday  28 March  2014 / Hour 1, Block D: Megan McCloskey, ProPublica, in re:  . . . making an identification would require a "monumental" amount of research about thousands of Americans and Germans killed in roughly the same area.

Fortunately for Gordon's family, he was buried in a German cemetery in France, not an American one, allowing his case to advance without the U.S. military's participation. French and German officials exhumed Gordon based on his family's evidence and identified him through DNA testing -- leading critics to wonder why the burden of proof in America is so much higher.

McCloskey explains that Gordon's case is just another example of breakdowns in the American system for finding and identifying tens of thousands of missing service members from past conflicts. More than 9,400 troops are buried as "unknowns" in American cemeteries around the world. Yet, as ProPublica and NPR reported, J-PAC rarely disinters any of those men to try to use DNA to identify them. On average, just 4 percent of such cases move forward. (2 of   2)

Full story as well as McCloskey's original report on the failings of J-PAC: free to reprint under ProPublica's Creative Commons license.

Hour Two

Friday  28 March  2014 / Hour 2, Block A:  Gregory Copley, StrategicStudies director & author, UnCivilization, in re: Obama to Russia: Pull troops from Ukraine borderU.S. officials express concern that the size and makeup of the forces could portend a new Russian attempt to annex parts of its neighbor.   Putin calls Obama about resolution.

Friday  28 March  2014 / Hour 2, Block B:  Ken Croswell, Science magazine, in re: Saturn-Like Rings Spotted Around Asteroid    Even before astronomers pointed their telescopes at a dim star over Chile last June, they knew it would darken for a few seconds as an asteroid passed in front of it. What they didn’t expect were two brief flickers a few seconds beforehand and afterward, suggesting that the asteroid was encircled by Saturn-like rings. The find is the first evidence for such rings around anything in our solar system other than a giant planet.

Like other teams positioned in a 1500-kilometer-wide swath across South America, the astronomers had started out the night with one mission: They intended to measure the size of Chariklo, an icy body that circles the sun between the orbits of Saturn and Uranus. Knowing Chariklo’s speed across the sky, they could . . . [more]

ScienceShot: Small World Spotted Far Beyond Pluto   Astronomers have detected a small world (inset) more than twice as remote as Pluto, lying 12 billion kilometers, or 83 AU, from the sun. (One AU, or astronomical unit, is the mean sun-Earth distance.) As scientists report online today in Nature, the new object is the first ever found whose orbit (red curve) resembles that of Sedna (orange curve), a far-off body that never gets close to Neptune's path (outermost magenta circle). Both Sedna and the new world, designated 2012 VP113, therefore differ from Pluto and other members of the Edgeworth-Kuiper belt (turquoise dots), which lie just past Neptune's orbit. The object journeys 80 to 452 AU from the sun, never approaching . . . [more]

Friday  28 March  2014 / Hour 2, Block C:  Richard A Epstein, Hoover Institution (Defining Ideas), & Chicago Law, in re:   The Wrong Way to Combat Poaching  (1 of 2)

Friday  28 March  2014 / Hour 2, Block D:  Richard A Epstein, Hoover Institution (Defining Ideas), & Chicago Law, in re:   The Wrong Way to Combat Poaching  (2 of 2)

Hour Three

Friday  28 March  2014 / Hour 3, Block A: Mona Charen, NRO, in re: Paul Ryan and the Left’s Desperation  Republican reformers who care about the plight of the poor are dangerous to the Democratic party.

Friday  28 March  2014 / Hour 3, Block B:  McKay Coppins, Buzzfeed, in re: How the ghettoization of conservative literature might be hurting the movement. (Includes a graphic showing how many books each of the prospective 2016 Republican presidential candidates has sold.)   [more]

Friday  28 March  2014 / Hour 3, Block C: David Farenthold, Washington Post, in re: Sinkhole of bureaucracy.  Deep underground, federal employees process paperwork by hand in a long-outdated, inefficient system. In BOYERS, Pa. — The trucks full of paperwork come every day, turning off a country road north of Pittsburgh and descending through a gateway into the earth. Underground, they stop at a metal door decorated with an American flag.  

Behind the door, a room opens up as big as a supermarket, full of five-drawer file cabinets and people in business casual. About 230 feet below the surface, there is easy-listening music playing at somebody’s desk.This is one of the weirdest workplaces in the U.S. government — both for where it is and for what it does.

Here, inside the caverns of an old Pennsylvania limestone mine, there are 600 employees of the Office of Personnel Management. Their task is nothing top-secret. It is to process the retirement papers of the government’s own workers.  But that system has a spectacular flaw. It still must be done entirely by hand, and almost entirely on paper. The employees here pass thousands of case files from cavern to cavern and then key in retirees’ personal data, one line at a time. They work underground not for secrecy but for space. The old mine’s tunnels have room for more than 28,000 file cabinets of paper records.  [more]

Above: Illustration by The Washington Post. Officials would not allow photography inside the facility. View the full graphic.   /  BREAKING POINTS:  WHERE GOVERNMENT FALLS APART.  First in a series examining the failures at the heart of troubled federal systems.

Friday  28 March  2014 / Hour 3, Block D:  Jeff Bliss, The Bliss Index, in re: The US Navy is testing homes there for radiation.    Like many former military bases/reservations that were conveniently "decommissioned" several years back, it's got all kinds of toxic waste problems.  

Bay Bridge teardown speeding up after delays. As demolition crews prepared to slice the cantilever section of the old Bay Bridge in half and start tearing it apart from the center, bridge officials said Monday that they will spend $12.7 million to speed up the dramatic deconstruction and make up for past delays.

Caltrans officials announced in January that the dismantling of the old span had fallen about six months behind schedule and began negotiations with the contractors to catch up. Bridge spokesman Andrew Gordon announced Monday that a deal had been reached to remove the east and west ends of the cantilever section simultaneously. Previously, the plan was to take down the west end first then move on to the east side. Removing both sides of the cantilever section, as well as the S-curve that connected to the Yerba Buena Island tunnels, at the same time could cut up to a year from the demolition, which has a flexible schedule of . . .   [more]

Hour Four

Friday  28 March  2014 / Hour 4, Block A:  Carson Bruno, Advancing a Free Society, in re:  Eureka: Sacramento Spotlight: Six California’s Part 2 – Economics of the New States

Friday  28 March  2014 / Hour 4, Block B:  Peter Berkowitz, Real Clear Politics, Hoover, in re: Peter Schuck's Rx for Big Government's Ills

Friday  28 March  2014 / Hour 4, Block C:  Robert Zimmerman, behindtheblack.com, in re: Russian craft docks with space station after delay  Arriving fashionably late, a Russian spacecraft carrying three astronauts docked with the International Space Station Thursday evening 250 miles over Brazil.

Friday  28 March  2014 / Hour 4, Block D:  Natalie Angier, NYT, in re:

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