KFC and Pizza Hut closed in Nepal as staff threatens to kill branch managers

All four KFC and Pizza Hut restaurants in Nepal shut down on Tuesday saying that staff had attacked and threatened to kill branch managers.

Devyani International, which operates outlets of KFC and Pizza Hut in Nepal and neighbouring India, wrote a letter to authorities announcing the immediate closure of its eateries in the capital Kathmandu.

“In order to disrupt our operations, some staff have physically attacked and threatened to kill the senior managers,” the company said in a letter leaked to local media and seen by AFP.

“These acts have put the life of senior managers at risk. To maintain the safety of our restaurants and the staff, we have shut down our services for an indefinite period,” it said.

The shutters were down at the four restaurants on Tuesday, and Devyani International and the police were unavailable for comment.

KFC and Pizza Hut, Nepal’s only international fast-food chains, opened their first branches in the country three years ago, generating long queues of locals wanting to sample international cuisine.

Their arrival was seen as a sign of an improving environment for foreign firms in a country ravaged by bloody civil war between 1996 and 2006, when a peace deal was reached between Maoists and the government.

During the violence, rebels targeted foreign ventures including Coke, Pepsi and Unilever, but more recently Kathmandu has seen rapid growth in restaurants, malls and supermarkets selling foreign goods.

Source: Raw Story

French riot night: Cops injured, cars torched, school burnt

Hundreds of French youths torched buildings and cars and clashed with police, injuring 16 officers during an overnight riot in the northern French city of Amiens.

French police reported that the clashes involved some 100 rioters and 150 officers, beginning around 9pm Monday and ending around 4am Tuesday.

At least three bystanders were hurt after rioters pulled drivers from their cars while hijacking the vehicles, the AP reported.

“The confrontations were very, very violent,” Amiens Mayor Gilles Dumailly told French television network BFM.

One of the events that sparked the riot was an arrest made over the weekend for dangerous driving, French media reported. The arrest was seen by many locals as insensitive and unnecessarily violent, as residents were attending a wake for a 20-year-old who died in a motorcycle accident.

A leisure center and two school buildings were razed, along with a dozen cars, local officials said. Rioters used trash cans as flaming barricades, and threw heavy objects at police officers, who responded by deploying tear gas, rubber bullets and a helicopter.

Amiens has experienced riots in the past. The city is infamous for high unemployment, racial tension and an aggressive police force.

The district in Amiens was among 15 areas declared the most troubled in France earlier this month, prompting the government to pledge additional security and money for the region. Dumailly hoped tensions would improve with a plan to fix up the housing projects and offer more services, he said at the time.

In 2005, France saw its worst urban unrest in 40 years, which led to the declaration of a state of emergency by the country’s then-center-right government. Entire neighborhoods of Amiens burned for nearly a month.

The 2007 deaths of two youths hit by a police car sparked another wave of violence in the city. Unrest flared again in 2010 when police shot and killed a youth who had robbed a casino.

Source: RT

Mississippi River Is Drying Up

Electronic 'Smart Fingertips' Could Give Robots and Doctors Virtual Touch

The same touchy engineers who gave us the first peelable epidermal electronics last year have a new virtual tactile system: Smart fingers, which could someday bring a real sense of touch to telepresence applications. Surgical robots or human doctors could virtually feel surfaces, temperatures and other characteristics, through special smart gloves designed to trick the brain into thinking it's feeling.

Materials scientist John Rogers and colleagues at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign designed flexible, skin-molded fingertip sensors made of super-thin silicon sheets. The gold conductive lines form a circuit, and the entire sensor is embedded in a flexible polymer material called polyimide. This is transferred to a thin silicone mould, which can be fitted to a fingertip shape. The sensor provides tactile feedback by forming electric currents when you press something. The currents are transmitted to your actual skin.

In tests, Rogers and colleagues donned the electronic fingertips and started touching flat objects. The resulting currents translated to a slight tingling sensation in their flesh-based fingertips. This is a step toward creating electrical signals that could be interpreted by the nervous system, according to ScienceNOW -- eventually, electronic fingers could create patterns of signals that can recreate sensations, from heat to texture.

The fingertips could also include separate sensors to detect things like motion or vibration. Rogers says in a news release that they could be used as medical devices -- perhaps for ultrasound imaging, or even as an ablation device, burning away problem tissue or creating sutures. "Imagine the ability to sense the electrical properties of tissue, and then locally remove that tissue, precisely by local ablation, all via the fingertips using smart surgical gloves," he said.

The main breakthrough here is the fingertips' stretchability and flexibility. Plenty of haptic feedback devices exist, but they're largely bulky, or flat, or otherwise unable to morph very well to the soft geometries of the body. This system is very similar to the first peelable, temporary tattoo-like skin electronics Rogers and colleagues developed last year. In that system, morphable electrodes are pasted onto the skin with water, hence the comparison to temporary tattoos. They could be used as health monitoring devices or machine-human interfaces, among other uses.

These fingertip sensors could conceivably be designed to fit any body part in need of some tactile feedback, Rogers and colleagues say -- like perhaps the heart, where it could sense muscle contraction or get things pumping properly. The research appears in the journal Nanotechnology.

Source: Popsci

Video: Indestructible Military Inchworm-Bot Survives Attack By Bootheels and Hammers

Soft, bendy robots could have a wide variety of benefits, from squishing into tight spaces to conduct surveillance, to crawling through a person's body to deliver drugs or take medical images. But it's hard to build entirely soft objects containing soft bodies, soft batteries and soft motors. A new version developed at MIT and Harvard is both soft and tough, inching around like an earthworm yet surviving multiple cruel blows from a rubber mallet.

The robot is nicknamed "Meshworm," after the earthworms that inspired its design. Rather than using liquid, air or silicone gears to get around, like other soft robots we've seen, Meshbot uses artificial muscle made from a shape-memory alloy. It looks very much like a squiggling worm, as you can see in the video below.

Researchers led by MIT mechanical engineering professor Sangbae Kim took a flexible mesh tube and encircled it in wires out of titanium and nickel, an alloy that contracts and expands with heat. They separated the wire into segments, much like those found in an earthworm, and applied a current to heat some of the segments. This made Meshworm's soft body squeeze together sections at a time, which caused it to inch along a surface. This type of locomotion is called peristalsis, and it's the same action used by snails, cucumbers and our own gastrointestinal tracts (to move food into our stomachs).

The team examined earthworm body structure to come up with this idea, and found that earthworms use latitudinal and longitudinal muscle groups to inch themselves along. The mesh tube represents the longitudinal section, and the shape-memory alloy represents the horizontal muscle group.

The best part may be the robot's durability. There are no pneumatic pumps, rigid gears or batteries to break, so the robot can survive all kinds of assaults. This could make it useful for military applications — DARPA funded this research. Kim and colleagues subjected the robot to a battery of tests to see how it held up, including smashing it with a mallet and stepping on it.

"You can throw it, and it won’t collapse,” Kim says. “Most mechanical parts are rigid and fragile at small scale, but the parts in Meshworms are all fibrous and flexible. The muscles are soft, and the body is soft … we’re starting to show some body-morphing capability.”

The team recently published details of the design in the journal IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics.

Meshbot Faces the Hammer: MIT researchers who designed the soft, flexible inchworm-bot tested its mettle by pounding it with this mallet and by stepping on it. The robot survived intact and kept inching away.  MIT News

Source: Popsci