Despite the Obama administration’s repeated warnings about the menace of a widespread contagion within the United States, both lawmakers and independent experts are continuing to give low marks to government initiatives designed to detect, track, and protect against those threats.

In recent years, both the Ebola outbreak in West Africa and the spread of the Zika virus in Latin America have brought the nature of threat into sharp relief.

At a San Bernardino County department operations center activated in the wake of the Dec. 2 terrorist attack, a decision was made to marshal extra ambulances from Riverside County.

Three teams of five ambulances were assembled — one was sent to Redlands, another to Rancho Cucamonga and the third remained in Riverside on standby.

Archimedes pointed out that with a lever he could move the world.

He most likely would have been surprised to learn that a team of six microrobots, weighing just 3.5 ounces in total, could pull a car weighing 3,900 pounds.

A group of researchers at the Biomimetics and Dexterous Manipulation Laboratory at Stanford University has been exploring the limits of friction in the design of tiny robots that have the ability to pull thousands of times their weight, wander like gecko lizards on vertical surfaces or mimic bats.

A natural gas leak may have caused a massive explosion early Wednesday in Seattle's Greenwood neighborhood -- obliterating at least one building, damaging many others and sending nine firefighters to the hospital.

One battalion chief and eight firefighters were transported to Harborview Medical Center after the incident, said Seattle fire spokeswoman Corey Orvold. These eight men and one woman all had been released as of 8 a.m. (11 a.m. ET), according to the hospital. Their injuries ranged from cuts to abrasions.