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... robot: thank you for conversing with me. l ..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. ooh, 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, i just 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 thattough, 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 i would never experience 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, whey. 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 weather conditions, you know, i 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, - 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 i in at night, watching netflix, going to sleep, whatever it may be, and waking up _ to a full charge. and so we're minimising the impact— of charging . infrastructure on the 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 rising and so it won't lifti any small buggies or children off the ground. _ and actually, - when it does rise, it does also make j an audible sound, so those that are visually impaired can hear that. i 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 your face? 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, ifound 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 don't 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 l down 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 the controller, - so you have different range of motion 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. for those who saw not a huge amount of sunshine on monday, there's certainly a greater chance over the next couple of days. tuesday and wednesday, looking sunnier by and large, a lot of dry weather around, a few isolated showers. some of the dampest conditions will actually be around first thing on tuesday. through the night, into tuesday morning, this is the weather system which will be bringing outbreaks of rain or drizzle across england and wales. it does mean a lot of cloud. it also means a very warm and humid start to the day. temperatures at around 1a to 17 degrees for some across the south, but it's here where the cloud

will be its thickest, some rain or drizzle, bit like we saw on monday. the odd heavy burst, south midlands, south—east, but it's clearing away a good deal quicker than on monday, and sunshine further north and west will develop a bit more widely as we go through the day. a few isolated showers possible, a bit of a breeze down the eastern coasts, but it's around some of the coastal seas, some of the sunniest conditions during the afternoon, especially to the north and the west. and temperatures of 19 to 2a degrees are bang—on average for this stage in the year. now, as we go into tuesday evening and overnight, we start with some clear skies. varying amounts of cloud, though, or pushing in from the west, stopping it from getting too chilly, but overall, a fresher night to take us into wednesday compared with what we see into tuesday morning. now, wednesday, there will be a bit more cloud around. that cloud will thin and break. there will be some sunny spells for many, the cloud tending to be thickest towards the west, especially as we go through the day. some showery bursts of rain, a little bit of drizzle in places, too, isolated light showers further east. many, though, again, a dry day on wednesday and starting to feel a bit more humid once more. and that humidity will last into wednesday night, but by thursday,

weather systems starting to push their way in off the atlantic will bring a lot more cloud generally speaking, so it's almost as if we're back to monday. lots of cloud to begin with. there will be outbreaks of rain around. some of the heaviest could be across southern counties through the day, spreading their way eastwards. some of the brightest conditions, probably across the north—east of scotland and then later into the west of ireland. temperatures down on what we've seen through recent days. thursday night and into friday, though, that rain gradually clears, lingering longest towards the south—east and the channel islands. could be there first thing friday morning. it will shift out of the way. good, long, sunny spells for many on friday, a scattering of showers. showers most likely, though, across the north and the west of the country. and temperatures very pleasant in the sunshine too. we'll see one or two showers around on saturday, but overall through the weekend, it's turning drier and warmerfor most.

live from washington, this is bbc news. joe biden urges democrats to embrace kamala harris as their presidential candidate as she quickly picks up key endorsements. the us secret service director tells congress donald trump's

attempted assassination was one of her agency's worst security failures in decades. and deadly as strikes hit southern gaza as israeli prime minister benjamin netanyahu travels to washington for high—level meetings. i'm sumi somaskanda. thank you forjoining us. good to have you with us. on monday, the democratic party will select its presidential nominee by online vote, with the possibility of a virtual rollcall though taking place as soon as august one if the harris is the only candidate. the date comes as democrats to flee back, harris officially kicked off a presidential campaign, just a day after president biden announced he would drop his election bid, endorsing his vice president to replace him on the party ticket. it's been a busy 2a hours for the vice president. cbs news estimates kamala harris as the support of the majority of democratic delegates.