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In 1950, government officials believed that serratia did not cause disease. That belief was later used as a justification for a secret post-World War II Army experiment that became a notorious disaster tale about the microbe.

The Army used serratia to test whether enemy agents could launch a biological warfare attack on a port city such as San Francisco from a location miles offshore.

For six days in late September 1950, a small military vessel near San Francisco sprayed a huge cloud of serratia particles into the air while the weather favored dispersal.

Then the Army went looking to find out where it landed. Serratia is known for forming bright red colonies when a soil or water sample is streaked on a culture medium — a property that made it ideal for the bio-warfare experiment.

Army tests showed that the bacterial cloud had exposed hundreds of thousands of people in a broad swath of Bay Area communities including Sausalito, Albany, Berkeley, Oakland, San Leandro, San Francisco, Daly City and Colma, according to reports that later were declassified. Soon after the spraying, 11 people came down with hard-to-treat infections at the old Stanford University Hospital in San Francisco. By November, one man had died. Edward Nevin, 75, a retired Pacific Gas and Electric Co. worker recovering from a prostate operation, had succumbed to an infection with Serratia marcescens that attacked his heart valves.

The outbreak was so unusual that the Stanford doctors wrote it up for a medical journal. But the medics and Nevin’s relatives didn’t find out about the Army experiment for nearly 26 years, when a series of secret military experiments came to light.

The Chronicle’s David Perlman, who reported on the revelations in 1976, found no evidence that the Army had alerted health authorities before it blanketed the region with bacteria. As the news surfaced, doctors started wondering whether the Army experiment that seeded the Bay Area with serratia two decades earlier might be responsible for heart valve infections then cropping up as well as serious infections seen among intravenous drug users in the ’60s and ’70s, said Dr. Lee Riley, a professor of infectious disease at UC Berkeley.

In the past, it’s always been people that put the finishing touches on the popular devices. Well, that’s all about to change.

Foxconn parent company Hon Hai is set to deploy an army of 10,000 assembly-line robots to help meet the demands of producing the highly anticipated iPhone 6. Hon Hai CEO Terry Gou revealed in a recent shareholder meeting that Apple would be the very first customer of Foxconn’s latest robots.

“Robots are going to enhance and speed up the manufacturing process,” said Tim Bajarin, CEO of market research firm Creative Strategies. “The really big issue here is that the demand for the iPhone continues to grow. It’s grown every quarter since it came out.”

From a business standpoint, it makes sense. “When you are dealing with creating millions of smart phones per month, efficiency is critical,” said Bajarin in an interview. “Robotics gives you that level of efficiency, which in the end, is very important for the bottom line.”

The Legged Squad Support System (LS3) is operated by a sensor strapped to a human foot.

Military footage shows Lance Corporal Brandon Dieckmann fitting the sensor to his boot, before LS3 follows him across a field.

The Extreme Accuracy Tasked Ordnance (EXACTO) system seeks to improve sniper effectiveness and enhance troop safety by allowing greater shooter standoff range and reduction in target engagement timelines. The objective of the EXACTO program is to revolutionize rifle accuracy and range by developing the first ever guided small-caliber bullet. The EXACTO 50- caliber round and optical sighting technology expects to greatly extend the day and nighttime range over current state-of-the-art sniper systems. The system combines a maneuverable bullet and a real-time guidance system to track and deliver the projectile to the target, allowing the bullet to change path during flight to compensate for any unexpected factors that may drive it off course.

On 5 July he spoke at a conference in London organised by the Centre for Investigative Journalism and revealed the extent of the surveillance programs unleashed by the Bush and Obama administrations.

But new federal data suggest that idea is largely a myth, and it raises questions for students who are planning their careers. Roughly three-quarters of people who have a bachelor’s degree in science, technology, engineering and math — or so-called STEM fields — aren’t working in those professions, the U.S. Census Bureau said Thursday.

Citing statistics from its most recent American Community Survey, the bureau found that only about half of engineering, computer, math and statistics majors in the U.S. had jobs in their chosen field. Science grads fared even worse: Just 26 percent of physical science majors and 15 percent of those with a diploma in biology, environmental studies or agriculture were in a STEM-related occupation.

It’s worth noting that unemployment among people with STEM degrees is considerably lower than for the general population of workers. As of 2012 (the latest year with available data), only 3.6 percent of college graduates between the ages of 25 and 64 were without a job, according to the Census Bureau, compared with 6.1 percent for the broader U.S. workforce.

One hundred years later, the world is nervously keeping its eyes peeled for misguided chauffeurs and asking itself whether history could repeat. The great powers are at peace, and trade and cultural ties between nations seem closer than ever before, yet the international scene is in many ways surprisingly brittle. In particular, a rising naval power is challenging an established hegemon, and a “powder keg” region replete with ethnic and religious quarrels looks less stable by the day.

In 1914, Germany was the rising power, the U.K. the weary hegemon and the Balkans was the powder keg. In 2014, China is rising, the United States is staggering under the burden of world leadership and the Middle East is the powder keg.

In recent weeks, Sunday delivery has launched in Seattle and Portland, and various other cities are potentially only weeks from going live — including the Boston area and a huge swath of California, including San Francisco and Silicon Valley.