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Phillip F. Schewe

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Scientific Agenda

The smarter electric grid of the future

By Phillip F. Schewe | 04/14/10
WASHINGTON — The smart grid idea aims to save money, reduce pollution, lower costs and create new "green" jobs.
Scientific Agenda

Digital Baseball: stats go to the next level

By Phillip F. Schewe | 04/05/10
WASHINGTON — Baseball fans who revel in the statistics surrounding the game, such as batting averages or the clocked speeds of curve balls, have gotten a windfall of data in the past few years thanks to multi-camera filming of games and new studies
Scientific Agenda

Upgrades to undersea Internet will add speed, versatility

By Phillip F. Schewe | 03/26/10
WASHINGTON — The Internet brings you data from around the world almost instantly. This information, coming from Geneva or Tokyo or Buenos Aires, arrives in the United States not from satellite but along cables that sit on the bottom of the ocean.
Scientific Agenda

Giant atom smasher in Switzerland sets record energy level

By Phillip F. Schewe | 03/23/10
WASHINGTON — The Large Hadron Collider accelerated protons to a new energy record of 3.5 trillion electron volts last week — a record for the fastest that particles have ever been accelerated by human technology.
Scientific Agenda

Rebates for clunker appliances

By Phillip F. Schewe | 03/18/10
WASHINGTON — Like the Cash for Clunkers program that removed gas-hog automobiles off the road, the Department of Energy's Appliance Rebate Program hopes to get electricity-hog appliances out of the home.
Scientific Agenda

U.S. scientist travels North Korea, where he held a lump of plutonium

By Phillip F. Schewe | 02/25/10
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Siegfried Hecker, sitting in a cold conference room, was asked by his North Korean hosts if he would like to see their "product."  "Yes," Dr. Hecker replied. "Do you mean plutonium?"
Scientific Agenda

Where cosmic rays come from

By Phillip F. Schewe | 02/17/10
WASHINGTON, D.C. — A new map of the sky made using a telescope sensitive to the most powerful kind of light, called gamma radiation, shows that some cosmic rays are coming from those exploding stars known as supernovas.
Scientific Agenda

University in Texas trying to build world’s most powerful laser

By Phillip F. Schewe | 01/25/10
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Producing a laser with a power of a terawatt — equal to one trillion watts — used to be impressive, but now the forefront of optical research power is measured in 1 quadrillion-watt units known as petawatts.
Scientific Agenda

Evidence for a new kind of stellar explosion 7 billion years ago

By Phillip F. Schewe | 01/13/10
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Astronomers meeting in Washington last week announced that a recent search for bright exploding stars -- commonly called supernovas -- found something quite unusual: antimatter.
Scientific Agenda

Staying power: Senate hearing focuses on energy storage

By Phillip F. Schewe | 12/11/09
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Thursday's Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing featured testimony from experts about the power industry's need to develop systems capable of storing large amounts of electricity if the nation's power grid intends