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The world is in desperate need of protective gear to keep health care workers safe and ventilators to help severely ill COVID-19 patients breathe. In the face of massively increased demand and stalled supply chains, engineers are scrambling to redesign equipment so it can be produced outside of specialized factories. Researchers at academic institutions are drawing on the spirit of the independent maker movement, according to Saad Bhamla, a bioengineer at the Georgia Institute of Technology....

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is also a big hadron discoverer. The atom smasher near Geneva, Switzerland, is most famous for demonstrating the existence of the Higgs boson in 2012, a discovery that slotted into place the final keystone of the current classification of elementary particles. But the LHC has also netted dozens of the non-elementary particles called hadrons—those that, like protons and neutrons, are made of quarks. The latest hadron made its debut at the virtual meeting of the European Physical Society on 29 July, when particle physicist Ivan Polyakov at Syracuse University in New York unveiled a previously unknown exotic hadron made of four quarks....

An apparent impact on Jupiter early Monday (Sept. 10) created a fireball on the planet so large and bright that amateur astronomers on Earth spotted the flash. The surprising impact on Jupiter was first reported by amateur astronomer Dan Peterson of Racine, Wisc., who was observing the largest planet in our solar system when the event occurred, according to the website Spaceweather.com, which tracks space weather and night sky events. “It was a bright flash that lasted only 1....

PARIS (Reuters) - Severe storms and hail lashed France’s Burgundy wine region leading to losses of up to 90 percent and threatening output for both the 2013 and 2014 vintages, producers said on Wednesday.Growers and officials were still assessing the impact of Tuesday’s storms on the vines, with damage anywhere between 10-90 percent in the Beaune region, but the Burgundy Wine Board (BIVB) said the Pommard and Volnay areas were the worst hit....

“How many scientists are in your government?” People asked me all sorts of things when I visited Moscow last year, but that simple question, and its expectation that naturally there should be many, made me pause. I knew of Russia’s multimillion-dollar “megagrant” investments to encourage expatriate researchers to work in the country and the around $11 billion set aside to gin up nanotechnology businesses. Visiting Doha, Qatar, I learned about that country’s pursuit of a “knowledge-based economy” and its aims to foster solar energy for desalination as well as telemedicine....

By Zoë Corbyn Sex would be a very different proposition for humans if – like some animals including chimpanzees, macaques and mice – men had penises studded with small, hard spines. Now researchers at Stanford University in California have found a molecular mechanism for how the human penis could have evolved to be so distinctly spine-free. They have pinpointed it as the loss of a particular chunk of non-coding DNA that influences the expression of the androgen receptor gene involved in hormone signalling....

First of a three-part series. Humans have harnessed hydrogen for a variety of applications, from blasting rockets into space to making common household products like toothpaste. Now, after decades of development, hydrogen is about to find its way into the family car. In June, Hyundai Motor Co. began leasing its Tucson Fuel Cell and has pledged to produce 1,000 units globally by 2015. Toyota Motor Corp. and Honda Motor Co. will start sales of their next-generation fuel cell vehicles (FCVs) next year....

The Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, is the biggest machine humans have ever built. Pooling the resources of more than 100 countries, it accelerates protons to within a millionth of a percent of the speed of light. When they collide, the protons break into their component parts (quarks and the gluon particles that glue them together) and create particles that were not there before. This is how, in 2012, the LHC achieved the first detection of a Higgs boson, the final missing particle predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics....

Greed is good for penguins that huddle together to avoid Antarctica’s icy weather. According to a new study, penguin groups can maximize everyone’s heat when individual birds act selfishly, huddling in ways that keep them toastiest. “Even if penguins are only selfish, only trying to find the best spot for themselves and not thinking about their community, there is still equality in the amount of time that each penguin spends exposed to the wind,” study researcher Francois Blanchette, a mathematician at the University of California, Merced, who normally studies fluid dynamics, said in a statement....

This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Beni, Democratic Republic of the Congo A crack runs down one window of the armoured vehicle transporting epidemiologist Mamoudou Harouna Djingarey through Beni, a city in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). An outbreak of the Ebola virus has killed nearly 1,500 people in the region since August, but it is not the only danger that Djingarey and other Ebola responders must confront....

When IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer edged out world chess champion Garry Kasparov during their celebrated match in 1997, it did so by means of sheer brute force. The machine evaluated some 200 million potential board moves a second, whereas its flesh-and-blood opponent considered only three each second, at most. But despite Deep Blue’s victory, computers are no real competition for the human brain in areas such as vision, hearing, pattern recognition, and learning....

Five of the nation’s top ice scientists found themselves in a conundrum. They’d been tasked with a formidable job: reviewing candidates for the American Geophysical Union’s fellows program, the most prestigious award given by the world’s largest earth and space science society. But when the group looked at its list of candidates, all nominated by peers, it spotted a problem. Every nominee on the list was a white man. “That was kind of a bit of a showstopper for me,” said Helen Fricker, a glaciologist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and one of the five committee members....

Editor’s Note: This story was originally published in the May 2007 issue of Scientific American and is being reproduced here on the occasion of the fourteenth anniversary of the 2003 blackout in the northeast United States. August 14, 2003, was a typical warm day in the Midwest. But shortly after 2:00 P.M. several power lines in northern Ohio, sagging under the high current they were carrying, brushed against some overgrown trees and shut down....

“Possibly veteran jumpers can describe sensations and thoughts during the brief seconds that elapse between the leap from the plane and the teeth loosening wallop that ensues when the parachute opens and applies sudden brakes to a headlong earthward plunge. But to a neophyte that brief passage of time remains pretty much a blank. Although the parachute harness is designed to distribute the shock to the portions of the body that are best suited to absorb it, the comeuppance you receive when the 28-foot-diametered canopy abruptly goes to work is comparable to an almost instantaneous reduction of the traveling speed to between 15 and 20 miles per hour....

Communities are spending money on disasters at the wrong time: after the damage has been done, not before. That is the central theme Zurich Insurance Group takes in a recently released report that draws conclusions about natural disaster mitigation by analyzing a series of 12 events—floods, storms and hurricanes—since the summer of 2013. In its study, the global insurer found that every $1 spent on “disaster resilience” saves $5 in limiting future costs, including post-storm cleanup efforts....

Brains today are expensive—metabolically speaking, that is. Pound for pound, the human brain demands a huge amount of energy to support its recently evolved language and social skills. Now a study offers some of the first strong evidence that the rapid development of our metabolically costly brain may have led to an unfortunate by-product: when energy problems arise, the result may be schizophrenia. No one knows exactly what causes schizophrenia, a debilitating disorder characterized by psychosis and severe cognitive impairments....

STARE at the tiny, central black fixation spot on the white cross in a. After 30 seconds, transfer your gaze to a neutral gray background. You should see a dark—almost black—cross fading in and out. It is especially pronounced if you blink your eyes to revive the image to slow down the fading. This effect is called a negative afterimage because the persistent ghost of the cross is the opposite of what you were looking at—it is dark instead of light....

The idea that organisms can live longer, healthier lives by sharply reducing their calorie intake is not exactly new. Laboratory research has repeatedly demonstrated the anti-aging value of calorie restriction, often called CR, in animals from nematodes to rats—with the implication that the same might be true for humans. In practice though, permanently reducing calorie intake by 25 to 50 percent or more sounds to many like a way to extend life by making it not worth living....

In February 1918 Alan L. Hart was a talented, up-and-coming 27-year-old intern at San Francisco Hospital. Hart, who stood at 5'4" and weighed about 120 pounds, mixed well with his colleagues at work and afterward—smoking, drinking, swearing and playing cards. His round glasses hemmed in his pensive eyes, a high white collar often flanked his dark tie, and his short hair was slicked neatly to the right. Though the young doctor’s alabaster face was smooth, he could deftly go through the motions of shaving with a safety razor....

About 30 nations to meet March 31 climate deadline Mexico is first emerging economy to submit plan By Alister Doyle and Valerie Volcovici OSLO/WASHINGTON, March 29 - The United States will submit plans for slowing global warming to the United Nations early this week but most governments will miss an informal March 31 deadline, complicating work on a global climate deal due in December. The U.S. submission, on Monday or Tuesday according to a White House official, adds to national strategies beyond 2020 already presented by the 28-nation European Union, Mexico, Switzerland and Norway....