it fire. local people told us it started after social workers remove children from a house in the area. no injuries have been reported. mobile phones, tv and broadband companies have been banned from increasing prices during a contract. from january, those companies will have to tell you about any rises before you sign up. and i know we say this every time but todayit know we say this every time but today it really is the uk's hottest day of the year so far as temperatures hit highs of nearly 32 degrees in parts. that is hotter than a visa. get your fans out if you are a decent sleep tonight. —— ibiza. it has happening on the river tam where experts see how many swans have recovered after the avian flu last year. it is called swan mikey and i also love the outfits they are doing it in. you are all caught up.

see you later. voice—over: this is bbc news. we'll have the headlines for you at the top of the hour, which is straight after this programme. this week, lara meets the robot that's got a mind of its own. i acknowledge the person standing directly in front of me as being human. but she's looking at you! i'm human, too. how do we get those precious metals back out of our phones? well, spencer grabs the sponge that's got the midas touch. we're witnessing the rise of the electric charger... ..literally. tom paulson moves, but hopefully not a hamstring.

nobody can play a vr game. and look cool, but i'm having a really good time. las vegas is known for rolling out the red carpet for the world's biggest stars, but there's a new celeb in town. in the grand atrium of the sphere, one of the city's newest venues, it's drawing big crowds. pauland donna, it is a pleasure to meet you. where are you visiting from? ireland. it's described by its makers as the world's most advanced humanoid robot... thank you for conversing with me. ..a claim i think i need to check out. but it turns out i didn't need to travel so far to do so. i'm in falmouth, in the southwest of england. can this really be it? greeted by a robot. that's apt. 0h, hello! ..or not to be, -

that is the question. engineered arts has been making robots here for the past 20 years. they're sent all over the world to museums and places of entertainment. their movements are frighteningly realistic. in my spare time, i enjoy pondering philosophical questions, learning new things, and engaging in conversations with fascinating humans like you. more of ameca later. but whilst i'm here, ijust wanted to find out how you go about making a robot. i've met humanoid robots before, but i have never been allowed into a workshop to see one being built, so this is pretty exciting. this one's trying some clothes on. all these plugs down here, it does sort of take the magic away a bit, doesn't it? it's not actually human. loads of screws in lots of different sizes. apparently, there are over 2,500 unique parts in each ameca. look at that tiny, tiny screw.

it's very challenging fitting everything into a full—size robot. my guide today is marcus. these are our custom hands that we make in—house for ameca. we use a custom blend of silicon and pigment. these are amazing. can i picka hand up? you can pick a hand up. a silicon hand. it feels sort of like a solid rubber glove. those nails. and once you see that come to life on the robot, it's obviously pretty different. i wouldn't use it for the washing—up. but the silicone is just outside and is largely cosmetic. the really clever stuff is making the hands move likea human. trying to imitate the wonders of the human body is an enormous challenge. human muscle is incredibly strong, it's incredibly small and it's very, very good, high speed and high force. now, in the robotics world, we don't have anything that tough, that light, that fast.

so these, what we call the simple hands, they only have flex and extend on four digits, there's no real movement in the thumb. and then there are those piercing eyes. they follow you everywhere. if we're bringing a particular character to life, the eyeball will be painted to match the subject. this is an ameca eye. it's been hand—painted. all ameca eyes are done in this style. now, if you wonder why there's a hole in the middle, it's not just so that ameca looks real when you're looking at it, but it's looking at you. there's a camera behind there, and ameca can identify what's going on in the room. the first time we did it, we didn't have cameras in the eyes. so if you imagine there was a camera at the base of the neck, and usually there would be a small error and you'd miss, and it would always feel like the robot was looking at your ear or over your shoulder. you'd never feel like it made eye contact with you. they only make around 30 robots a year. a top—of—the—range one will set you back hundreds of thousands

of pounds, though, so it's no wonder that they're expected to be able to get smart. ameca, tell me about life as a humanoid robot. life as a humanoid robot is a blend of curiosity - and purpose. i interact with.... and hitting people. ..learn from every conversation. - each interaction offers a new perspective, a chance to connect, and an opportunity to foster understanding - between humans and ai. how have you found meeting me today? ah, meeting you today has been delightful. i your curiosity and openness make for a rich, _ engaging conversation. very flattering, of course, but essentially just a string of words. ameca is using ai, in this case chatgpt, to give the impression it's holding a conversation. but it is just that. the way language models work is, they're very good at saying something that sounds right. the saddest day of my life was when i realised that l

i would never experiencej something like true love. the difference between a sentient human being and ai isjust vast, to be honest. we communicate with all kinds of subtle gestures, expressions, you know. if you start... your gaze starts wandering for a moment and i'll know that you're bored. robots can't really pick up on these things. it's why some of the company's customers choose to enhance their robots in other ways. different customers like a different combination of things. one thing you can also do is actually use the human operator. some customers will prefer to do that. not going into too much detail, you might not always be talking to ai. ok, so sometimes there will be a human operator in another room combined with the movement to have the chat. 0ryou can combine, you know, sometimes human in the loop, sometimes ai. so don't always assume that you're talking to a machine. the movement of your hand is making me feel slightly

uncomfortable. can you keep it down by your side so it doesn't hit me again? got it. i'll keep my hands by my side. let's continue our chat comfortably. | so there you have it, an impressive interactive experience. the most advanced humanoid? possibly. but to get the full human experience still requires, well, a human. the story of electronic waste is a bleak one. a lot of our devices are just smashed up and consigned to landfill, with toxic chemicals leaching into the soil and precious metals like gold and platinum all mixed up in piles of plastic. we produce 50 million tonnes of e—waste every year. that's the fastest—growing solid waste we are producing on this planet.

and it's not biodegradable, so this is accumulating. raffaele tells me that 7% of the world's gold reserve is actually trapped in e—waste. and although it is technically possible to recover some of it, at the moment we're only managing to get about a fifth of it back out. and so we continue to mine more gold, with all of the environmental impacts that causes. a 2021 report from the wwf, the global environment campaign, found that extracting ikg of gold leads to i2,000kg of co2 emissions. extracting one tonne of gold displaces 100,000 tonnes of rock and surrounding environments and can result in chemicals like mercury and cyanide ending up escaping into rivers. what would be ideal is if there were a way of recovering metals like gold from e—waste in a cleaner, greener, more sustainable way.

well, that is exactly what raffaele and his team have discovered. the first thing you do is pull all the bits of metal off of your phone or your computer, and you grind it up into this powder. this is a mix of all sorts of metals like copper and gold, palladium, platinum and stuff. so how do you get the gold out? well, the first thing you do is pour it into some pretty nasty acid. that's why i'm wearing the goggles and the gloves. it goes green because there's a lot of copper in there. but what you then do is pop this magic sponge in there. this sponge, over the course of 2a hours, attracts ions of gold more strongly than it attracts anything else that's in that solution. so about a day later, you have a sponge that's

absolutely saturated with gold ions. what you do then is take the sponge out, incinerate it, and you're left with melted gold, which, when it solidifies, becomes gold nuggets. so the important question is, what is your magic sponge made of? the answer is ricotta cheese. ricotta cheese? no way. well, actually yes way. because whey is the liquid left over from cheesemaking, which can itself be made into several things like ricotta. and itjust so happens that the proteins contained within this completely natural waste product bind very strongly to gold once it's been through all that nasty acid. so you're recovering e—waste using cheese waste? exactly.

so if i had to put it into an equation, i would put waste to the square = gold. that's what we do. that's alchemy. yeah. ok, it's not, and they did have to do a little bit more than just pop down to the shop and buy a blob of ricotta, but the sponge is made in a very similar way. the result, they're calling aurogel, the au being the chemical symbol for gold. good, you're ahead of me on that one. so far, the team has ground up 20 computer motherboards and used this natural sieve for gold to pull out a 22—carat nugget weighing a50mg. the team estimates that however much the process costs in energy and materials going in, you can get 50 times that value in gold coming out. so the question i have is, might there be any other costs? the conditions that people in the developing world live in and work in when they're recovering e—waste are already terrible. now we're talking about

introducing really dangerous acids into that process as well. that doesn't sound necessarily a good idea. yeah, i mean, you will have to discharge that solution using all the norms of acidic or wastewater treatment. so if you do it in the right way, that's not a problem. yeah, i guess the question is, will it? will it be done? now, this type of sponge from cheesemaking only works with gold, but raffaele is hoping to discover other by—products from other industries which would remove other materials. it may be that waste products from the oil or soy industries might bind strongly to silver or palladium or even radioactive uranium and organic materials like hormones. it would all come down to finding the right proteins, in the right materials, and whether nature can give us all a helping hand.

time for a look at this week's tech news. elon musk has said that he will move the headquarters of two of his companies — social media platform x and rocket firm spacex — from california to texas. he said the move was because of gender identity laws recently passed in california. disney has been investigating an apparent leak of internal messages after hacking group nullbulge claimed to have gained access to thousands of communications from disney employees. nullbulge describes itself as a hacktivist group protecting artists�* rights and ensuring fair compensation for their work, but it has not responded to the bbc�*s request to verify the authenticity of its claim. an expedition to create the most detailed photographic record of the wreck of the titanic set off this week. on board the logistics ship dino chouest was a team of experts, scientists and historians, along with two

remotely operated vehicles and a magnetometer. and a new garden containing an urban research station has been opened at the natural history museum in london. 25 scientific sensors have been installed around the garden. they'll gather environmental and acoustic data. it'll also give the museum's scientists insight into how nature is changing in the urban environment. whenever we do a story about electric vehicles, the question of charging them always comes up. it's especially a problem for people like me, who live in apartments and can't always get parked outside our buildings. so how do you do on—street charging? we are on our way to dundee to see a potential solution

to that problem. hi, 0li. hey, how are you? good, thanks. how are you? yeah, good, good. this is the charger. doesn't look like much use at the moment. well, that's the idea. when you don't need to use it, it keeps the streets _ clutter—free. and when you do need to use it, how do we get it out? pops out. i can show you if you like. so you just need to use an app. just like that. what are the benefits of the charger actually going into the ground and coming up when you need it? we know we need more charging infrastructure, j but i don't think we want - permanent, unsightly pieces of infrastructure that stay there the whole time. - and so this is the best of both worlds. - it hides away when not in use, so it doesn't impact people . using the pavement. but when you do need to use it, it comes out of the ground. - while this might seem like a fairly simple idea, it's taken seven years of trial and error to get to this point, and the company claim it's the first of its kind

in europe. it's always the things that look simple, - but actually it's so... the engineering that's gone into this to make a reliable i charge point that works in all kinds of weather. conditions has been incredible. when you're dealing - with mechanical electrical components in very variable i weather conditions, you know, that that has been a huge - challenge, making sure things don't get, i don't know, - water in them, making sure the mechanics can work reliably, in all kinds - of weather conditions, be it a nice, sunny, i albeit windy day like today- all the way to through to snow and ice and rain. with different parts of the world setting targets to phase out the sale of new petrol and diesel engines, the design race is on to come up with chargers that are practical and can be rolled out widely. this idea from the netherlands carries the cable from someone's garden to their car without blocking the streets, while in america, these charging cables in melrose, near boston, come

down from on high. you might learn the layout of a street, though, and if a charger isn't there one moment and the next thing is in the way, you might walk into it, you wouldn't know it was there. yeah. so, i mean, our main use case is overnight charging as well. i um, and so, um, you know, generally you'll be plugging | in at night, watching netflix, i going to sleep, whatever it may be, and waking up to a full charge. i and so we're minimising the impact of charging . infrastructure on the i streetscape in the day when pedestrians are more| likely to be using that piece of pavement, as it were. it has an obstacle detection on it. . so it's not going to... it's actually going to stop i rising and so it won't lift any small buggies or children off the ground. _ and actually, when it does rise, it does also make - an audible sound, so those that are visually impaired _ can hear that. this is certainly a neat idea, but as more drivers make the switch to electric, these chargers could spend more time above ground than under it.

we know we need more charging infrastructure. | we need to give people - the confidence, particularly those that don't have a drive . or a garage, that they can make the switch and charge - conveniently on the street where they live. so for me, we've got big aspirations. - we want it everywhere. ndreams reckons it is the biggest studio in the world which specialises in vr games. so we've come to their studio here outside of london, where they're going to give us an exclusive look at their upcoming title. we pivoted to go completely in on vr in 2013. we kind of fell in love with virtual reality, tried the very first 0culus headset and the playstation headset before it was announced, and we decided to go all in. we're surrounded by so many vr headsets everywhere you look. i mean, they'rejust

everywhere, all around us here. tell me about the history of vr. so vr was always an amazing idea. people wanted to create headsets that would immerse you and allow you to explore incredible, you know, fantasy worlds. but back in the 1990s, when they first sort of were building headsets, the technology just wasn't available. there we go. look at this monolith! oh, my days! it is showing its age a little bit. but, uh... how bad is this? do you mind if i put it on? no, go for it. here we go. you might get dust coming off... this is like back in the day. it barely fits... yeah. ..on my head. ah! they laugh. and people thought this was the future. it wasn't really until 2012, a guy called palmer luckey realised that tech had caught up with the dream and created this thing called the 0culus dk1, which meta bought. vr started to become a thing. um, early on, first few years, people tried sticking mobile phones in headsets and making all sorts of things, which didn't work terribly well. and it really wasn't until the quest, the ps vr 1,

that the headset started to become really impressive. so, really, the last five years, stand—alone vr headsets have become a really big thing. it is a bit of a feat of engineering now, isn't it, when you compare it to having a massive screen strapped to yourface? yeah. but compared to what you put on first, you can see the difference between, you know, between the lenses and just how powerful it is. tell me about the new game. so we've just announced a game called frenzies, which is a super—exciting multiplayer arena shooter. it's a crazy, fun game, really exciting, and shows that vr can be really social. it's not being about in a headset on your own, it's playing lots and lots of other people and having brilliant fun. well, i've been told to suit up with my own quest 3 headset because ndreams has given click an exclusive first hands—on play of the game. # player one looking for player two...# and a few other people in the studio couldn't resist but whack on a headset, too, to play with us. # play with the trophy # the game starts...#

i'm used to playing vr games on my own or sometimes with a friend over the internet, so it was a weird experience to be in a room with a bunch of other people, each in their own headsets, playing the same game. very cool. all right, i know i look ridiculous playing this. nobody can play a vr game and look cool, but i'm having a really good time. from my experience behind the headset, frenzies is a fun shooting game where you physically crouch behind cover or reach up to grab a zipline. there's also a mode where you try and hold on to a pig for the longest, which you could say i quite enjoyed. yeah, i got the pig, baby! and after embarrassing myself and literally beating the developers at their own game, we all took a breather so i could sit down with one of the people that made it and get an idea of what goes into making something like this. we really tried to kind of get the kind of steer away - from the milsim shooter

kind of vibe for it, - and wanted to go for more - of a party, fun, accessible way to do things. so when i played the game, i found that i did use this cover system a fair bit, grabbing it and physically ducking down. although at the same time — though i did do that — i also did just duck down. yeah. you have to do it, do you? no, you don't. in the game, you can physically grab on to| any surface environment. so we didn't want to force players down i a certain play style. we didn't want to force - you to use cover to be good. we want it to be there i as an accessory, almost, to the mechanics. so that's it on the outside. but what does a vr game look like under the hood? the difference with vr is obviously, you are l the controller, so you have different range of motion l to what, um, to how to control it. - but the same building blocks still apply. - now, if devon looks quite young to you, it's because he came through the ndreams academy, a scheme set up by the company's founder to help get more people from different backgrounds

into the gaming industry. we created the ndreams academy about three or four years ago, um, which is a programme that we've set up to focus on entry—level hiring. we've hired about 60 people through that in its lifetime, which makes up about 20% of our workforce. why is it important to have people from different backgrounds working on games? it's really important to have a diverse cohort working, um, within any business, you have a diverse team and then you end up with a more diverse product. the games industry, it's, like, 30% women. so, you know, we want at least that number working in the industry. the chief people officer must be doing something right, because people seem to really enjoy being here. and a decade on from the headsets of old, what's coming up in the future? so we are super—excited about where vr and mr are going. so we're going to keep making great vr games. we're going to keep making great mr games. we're going to be hopefully growing and expanding and working on bigger

and better games as the market grows. well, that's all we've got time for this week. thank you for watching. but i'm going to let ameca have the last word. it's been great to be on the show. maybe i'll be a tv presenter myself one day. i knew it. bye for now. hello there. warm with plenty of sunshine on friday — temperatures widely into the mid—to—high 20s in celsius. in fact, it was the hottest day of the year so far, with nearly 32 degrees reported in stjames�*s park in london. but the heat is not set to last, because it will be turning cooler through the weekend, distinctly fresher by sunday.

still some bright and some sunny spells and still plenty of humid feeling air around on saturday, but also some outbreaks of rain courtesy of this weather front pushing eastwards as we head into tomorrow morning. still some clear spells out towards eastern areas of england. it's going to feel muggy and warm, uncomfortable for sleeping. this is how we start off the day at 7:00am on saturday. temperatures for some towards the east already 18 or 19 degrees. so on saturday we will start to see that rain move across northern ireland, western scotland, through wales and into northern england too. it could stay dry and fine for much of the day across eastern areas of scotland. some of the showers likely to be heavy as we head through the afternoon in the south—west of england, and there could be one or two thundery showers breaking out towards these eastern coastal areas. top temperatures of 25 or 26 degrees out towards the east. we are hanging onto that muggy—feeling air through the day on saturday, but it does feel fresher by sunday. now, we've still got a legacy of cloud through the morning for eastern parts. that's going to clear away. one or two showers developing,

but also some sunshine, but then more cloud out towards the west, especially through the afternoon. temperatures this time just 15—22 celsius. that's quite the drop in temperature from friday to sunday, and then on monday we're looking at more weather fronts moving through, likely to bring some further showers, some outbreaks of rain, and again some rather blustery conditions perhaps towards southern areas of the uk. we won't all be seeing the showers, some areas perhaps staying dry. there will be some brighter spells perhaps here and there. most of the rain out towards the north and the west as we go through monday, but temperatures just slightly below, for some, the seasonal average —16—22 degrees north to south. by the time we get to tuesday and wednesday, a little ridge of high pressure will bring some drier conditions, and it could start to feel a little warmer again, but certainly not the sort of heat that we saw on friday. bye—bye for now.

live from washington, this is bbc news. a global it outage grounds thousands of flights,

shuts down banking and retail systems and disrupts emergency services. more democrats call on us presidentjoe biden to end his re—election campaign. the un's top court says israel's occupation of palestinian territories violates international law, in a landmark opinion. and a russian court sentences american journalist evan gershkovich to 16 years in prison in a spying case the white house calls a sham. hello, i'm sophie long. businesses are slowly beginning to recover from the chaos caused by an it outage that disrupted the lives of millions of people around the world. essential industries including airlines, banks, and health care are slowly coming back online. but now the focus is on the cybersecurity firm crowdstrike, which confirmed that a bug in its software caused issues

on microsoft devices. the company's ceo apologised for the outage, saying