as the world cup party descends. helen willetts has the weather lovely sunny day, strong sunshine lifting the temperatures into the higher teens lifting the temperatures into the higherteens in lifting the temperatures into the higher teens in the north, low 205 in the south. some rain and drizzle, that should pull away for most parts of mainland scotland as we go through, temperatures tumble again under the 5tarry 5kie5, down to 5ingle figure5 quite widely in the countryside, five, 6 degrees as opposed to three or four we have 5eenin opposed to three or four we have seen in recent night5, not quite as low, temperatures to start, therefore should get a little higher, through the course of sunday, because sunday, higher, through the course of sunday, becau5e sunday, early morning mi55ed, 5hould sunday, becau5e sunday, early morning mi55ed, should be a lovely 5unny morning mi55ed, should be a lovely sunny day for most. bit more cloud for east anglia and the south—east, temperatures into the low 205. low

and plea5a nt. temperatures into the low 205. low and pleasant. —— mi55ed. not as much cloud for scotland and northern ireland, temperatures into the 205, 24, 25. temperatures continue to lull day and night as we move into next headlines: dozens of people are marching through london to demand a vote on the final deal on the uk's departure from the eu. senior cabinet ministers meanwhile stressed the uk is still prepared to walk away from brexit talks without a deal. explosion rocks a stadium in zimbabwe, president emerson was addressing thousands of people, officials say that he was injured. turkeynot ‘s president erdogan has called for real action tomorrow, on the final day of campaigning in the

presidential and parliamentary elections in the country. more from me at 4pm, right now on bbc news it is time for click. —— emmerson mnangagwa. this week: robot hunts killer starfish, hurricane in a tube, and gravity train runs out of steam. florida, america's sunshine state. and home to the us‘s first sustainable town. this is babcock ranch. powered, but fittingly, almost entirely by that

big ball in the sky. it is 33 degrees. that humidity is, i believe, about i,000,000%. and i have come to a solar field, so you don't have to. 343,000 solar panel spent some 440 acres, providing 75 megawatts of electricity. that is enough to power 15,000 homes. one of the big things with solar energy has been with the clouds, over or especially when it gets dark, the whole thing effectively goes dead. and we have not really had a way of storing solar energy until very recently. but over there, ten buildings full of batteries. so it is a start.

a pretty good one, too. babcock has the largest combined solar and storage facility in the us. the batteries can store 40 megawatt hour of electricity, which is enough to keep around 2000 average us homes are light for four hours. of course, lithium batteries are just one way of storing energy to use later. we have seen other methods before. there is electric mountain in wales which holds water at a top reservoir until power is needed, it then releases it back down to the lake below. switzerland's air cave fills itself with compressed air and then blows it out to turn turbines. now, over in california, kate russell is on track to see a new solution. since the oil crisis of the 1970s, california has invested heavily into wind and solar power, with the latest state legislation calling for 50% renewable energy by 2030 and all new homes must have solar within two years.

the state is a way ahead of its target, so much so that they have had to start paying neighbouring states to take some of the energy from them. as we've heard before, the problem is storage will stop the grid was built to handle fossil fuel generated power and storage solutions like hydroelectric dams are in short supply. batteries are bad for the environment, turning a news renewable energy into not such a green solution. california —based company aries have come up with one alternative. aries was really an attempt to think of a way to use the inexhaustible, always reliable power of gravity.

we know gravity is going to be there for us. we don't have to worry about shortages or any of that. so how do we use gravity to store and then discharge power when we needed? one of the most official ways that make best ways to use than these waves. 150 years of experience, incredibly efficient, steel wheels on steel rails are one of the most efficient ways to move mass. dubbed the gravity train, energy is used in electricity to push its weight uphill. when you want to take the energy out you let gravity pull the train back down, using the friction braking too slow to be trained in order to make power. it is the same way hybrid electric cars like the prius work. you see those wind turbines behind me, they are completely still, even though there is clearly plenty of wind right now. it is not because they are broken, it is because there is no more room to store the energy they would create. and that is the problem the gravity train well sold. when you are into access energy production, use it to power the train up a hill, when you want the energy back,

centre the train backed down again. this demo train carries almost five times uphill, is touring energy as it goes. a full—scale installation will return 80% of the stored energy, which is not quite as efficient as a huge dam, but has a lot less impact. the amount of energy we store is the weight of the train times the height of the hill. the more weight and the high the hill be more energy we can store. we need long, gently sloping plains. we have clients who approached u5 and said i only have 5teep, rocky, craggy mountain5, so we have developed a new variation on the arie5 technology at almost vertical. in october, the company breaks ground on the first full—scale aries in the state of nevada. it will be used to fine tune the inconsistent energy flows that are a natural part of using solar and wind power. minute by minute it will trim the imbalance between the load

and generation on the grid, so our trains may need to go uphill for a minute, they need to go downhill for five minutes, they are constantly acting like a large flywheel that allows the grid to stay at exactly 60 hertz. it is early days yet and the concept has yet to be proved in nevada, but it could help solve one of the renewable industries biggest conundrums right now, balancing the ebb and flow of nature made energy in a more substantial way. after we run 30 or 40 years providing energy storage and helping people we can remove all of our facilities very quickly, 96% of them can be either repurposed or recycled, so only 4% of our facilities would ever go into a landfill. we are trying to reduce that. we can then plant some native vegetation and six months later you would never know our facility was there. that was kate on a roll in california. back at babcock i am

going for a solar powered speed in an autonomous shuttle, with its chief financial officer. i guess the motivation for having these autonomous vehicles is that you are encouraging families here to not have as many cars. correct. our thought is that over time most families in the us are a two—car family. our hope is that we can get from a two—car to a one—carfamily, you have a couple of the family, perhaps, but if you have it for a commuterfor work you were needed, you can take the autonomous shuttle to work. over time perhaps there are no cars will stop i think, realistically, within the next 10— 15 years we can go from two to one—car. you think the us government at the moment doesn't... i think they get it. governments move slowly, typically. in major cities, major metros, where traffic and pollution are an issue, technology can come in and save a lot of that. i think governments can step up and sold a lot of that.

we are seeing that slowly. what we are hearing and reading about it a lot of major urban cores are going to become, there will be restricted access, if you drive your car train to get the weight gajion, up to a certain mile, three miles outside of the citicorp you will not be able to get in outside of a autonomous vehicle. —— city core. building a city or a town that is sustainable, you are not going to be able to do this in colder, more crowded parts of the world. i think that is right. we have a unique situation here, we have the benefit of scale. there are not many people who have 1000 acres of land. that is a big chunk of it. along with autonomous shuttles, babcock as is and waste facilities, and as and as well as reclaiming water, there is a restriction on the amount you are allowed to use. the tin roofs reflect heat, making homes 10% better at keeping cool,

and the range‘s on—site gym is environmentally friendly, too, it is powered by the treadmills. one incentive to get off the couch, i suppose. it is a commendable vision to build a town with all these sustainable values, but i can't help thinking can only really do this when you are building a community from scratch. i mean, could you imagine trying to retrofit an existing town with all of these technologies? you basically have to tear up the infrastructure and tear down all the buildings and start from scratch anyway. babcock has been built in the style of old, to attract those who are not necessarily find a new—build feel. are you expecting the? people like the kinleys.

do you mind if i step inside your air—conditioning and stay there? they have a robot vacuum cleaner. a coffee—making fridge. it is set up so it won't spill all over the place. and an electric car. for richard, a self—confessed geek and a real fan of click, babcock was his calling. just reading tech blogs all the time on the internet and it sounded fascinating to me. i liked the idea that it was an environmentally friendly and was looking forward as far as energy solutions. in atlanta, we lived just down th block from one of the biggest coal— polluting pla nt5 in the country. i thought that cannot be healthy.

i think of it as guilt—free living. in the uk when you have a small town with a central area and you can walk to, it encourages walking, so it is the lifestyle. and while the buildings may look like historic florida, for me it was also all the technology, you know, having i gigabyte of fibre optic, intranet in the homes... yeah, you definitely like that. hello and welcome to the week in tech. it was the week that the world health organization classified gaming disorder as a condition capable of causing debilitating addiction. arguing with your malfunctioning tech could soon become a whole lot more intellectually stimulating. ibm put it is project abated to its test this week. the system as the arguments of its human opponent and then scans hundreds of millions of documents in its memory to construct what it considers to be a sound and logical argument. having analysed the data, i will argue... ever wished you caught something in slow motion after you filmed it?

a chip designer shows us how ai could be used to fill in the gaps, turning 30 frames per second footage into 240 frames per second slick slow motion. and finally, the battle for our eyes and ears is hotting up. facebook has gone head to head with youtube, with plans to let social media stars into its previously high end watch programme. meanwhile, facebook—owned instagram has plans to host longer videos on the programme, much like youtube. youtube has been wanting its subscription service, making content available off—line in 12 more countries, including the uk. confused? just go watch a video and relax. hurricane season is just around the corner in the us and that means that south florida is once again at risk from deadly winds and storm surges. much of it lies less than five metres above sea level. miami airport is just one metre. and in the further future, even moderate estimates of climate

change mean that the sea will swallow much of this area by the year 2100. it is probably no surprise that some of the most advanced hurricane research in the world is going on here at the university of miami. this is a hurricane simulator. it is a 23 metre long glass tank filled with water and connected to an enormous fan, which means they can generate the strongest winds overwater anywhere in the world. up there they can simulate a category 5 hurricane. a 1500 horsepower motor drives 65 metre per second winds, flipping up spray and smashing waves into whatever they put in the tank. the sensors in the tank measure how those waves behave and what they do to florida's buildings. because it is not so much the winds as the storm surge. the water driven inland

by the storm that causes so much destruction and loss of life. in a hurricane, two metres of floodwater is accompanied with large waves on top of that and the way bleeding is really dramatic. it is what we are talking about, with waves that are quite often breaking and coming and hitting the structure. it is an impulsive force but it is repeated, many times, during a storm. even if it is only an hour, that can really do dramatic damage. and what have you found so far? how can you build houses better now because of what you have found? one of the key things we have found in some recent measurements related to the structures directly, is that often, with decking,

it is actually where the wave gets trapped underneath it. that is like an explosive uplift force. so you really have to look at how you engineer the attachments on things. ok, we are about to go to full speed. ok, here comes the spray now. understanding the forces on these models will help develop new guidelines on what support structures would help a building withstand the onslaught of a storm surge. so if somehow you were under the sea during a hurricane, this is what you would see. it is better than being on top, i can tell you that. have you ever been there when it is on category five,

even in your christmas parties? no, we would not go in there, because there is not much to hold on to and in the back of it is is like cheese slicer. so i don't really want to be turned into sausage or cheese. the team here aren'tjust trying to make stronger buildings. they are also testing ways of stopping the full force of the waves from getting to the land in the first place. here, they are looking at the effect of the seawall on protecting the house. further out in the water, something you might not expect. a coral reef. we've actually been reading some global studies which show that wave energies actually dissipated 97% on average, as waves hit a reef crest, and go towards shore. so they act like 97% efficient waves break?

that's right, it is a healthy reef with a reef crest. it doesn't look to me like there is that much coral there. and it doesn't come to the surface. does that really do a good job? it can, actually, yes. with the waves you have the kind of circular motion that happens at the top, it causes circular motion all the way down, in a little ellipsis. come down to the seafloor. anything that disrupts that helps to slow down the wave. the problem is thatjust when we need coral to protect from climate change, climate change is killing coral. although corals, much like the trees in the rainforest, are the possible habitat builders of the ecosystem, it you lose the corals, just like if you lose the trees in the rainforest, you end up with no ecosystem. the corals building that habitat are very thermally sensitive. they are some of the most climate change sensitive species on the planet. the reason they are so sensitive to climate change is because they are very vulnerable

to small changes in temperature. an unusually hot summer causes a coral to turn white, in a process we call coral bleaching. that sets of tony white is a process whereby this symbiosis between the coral animal and this tiny single cell plant that lives inside its tissue, that's an biosis breaks down and the coral spits out its allergy, turns white, and unless it can somehow recover those allergy it will die. it starves, from lack of food. andrew baker has spent the last 25 years trying to create coral that is more resistant to increasing temperatures. we have found over the years that lie gently bleaching corals deliberately in the laboratory we can encourage them to change their symbiotes in favour of this thermally tolerant types. just now we are starting for the first time this pilot experiment of doing this out in nature, in the field, in reefs off miami, where it is what we are calling stress hardening these corals, encouraging them to change

their algae in favour of the tolerant ones that will help them to resist bleaching and hopefully persist into the future. so beautiful, isn't it? and while they are working towards growing more resilient coral here in miami, there are of course projects going on across the globe to protect the coral we already have stopped next kwek went to see one such project at the most famous coral reef in the world. the great barrier reef, australia, wonder of the world. earth's largest living thing, sprawling 1600 miles. but this paradise could soon be lost at the hands of a very surprising vandal. crown of thorns starfish eat coral,

and although they are found he naturally, recently too many have been pouring in at once due to major weather events and ocean pollution. you would think a starfish would be a cute, gorgeous thing you would see on the great barrier reef. the crown of thorns starfish, not so much. they are spiky, ugly, they can have up to 20 or 30 arms. the biggest issue with crown of thorns starfish is that they can eat up to one metre of coral per day. when they are in plague proportions they can absolutely desolate a reef. to the rescue, the ranger bots. these underwater drones autonomously scoured the reef starfish and prick them with a deadly dose of salt. the bots use an algorithm to identify starfish and then target them. they are developers say they are not in 9.4% accurate. and they get smarter with time. traditionally, divers have monitored the reef by going out and doing a visual check.

something time consuming not to mention expensive. they can only be in the water for up to three or four macalister day. they can't dive at night. whereas the ranger bot has the capacity to be in the water for eight hours a day. it can dive at night. it also doesn't have some of the human failings that we know we have, where reaction we see and miss things as we are getting dragged along under the water. working around the clock could make a big difference to. evidence suggests the thorny carnivores come out more at night. the ranger bots of lights, so their cameras can still see once the sun goes down. so inside these things you have got inertial sensors, pressure sensors, a gps so it knows where it is going. and it also has to make computers working some of tony asleep. one to process the images and want to know where it is going and understand the navigation route. the game changer is that b6 thrusters, which allow it to go forward, backwards,

up, down, leftand right, it also side to side, so when it spots the crown of thorns starfish it doesn't need to do a big loop the loop, it can just stop and zap them where they are. the bots are team players, too. the beauty of having this is that if we have multiple vehicles we put them here, we send them off in all directions, they pop up 500 metres away and they already know how many they have seen. so we say, ok, zero, zero, zero, ten. that is our focus area. within 20 minutes we know roughly where we should be focusing our efforts. we will never outcompete a human and we are not trying to outcompete a human, but if we can give them the tools to extend their operational capability, that is a goal. constantly patrolling the reef, the rangers can also monitor water equality, measure coral bleaching and map the deep blue like never before. one of the issues we have about the great barrier reef is that it is so big we only know a fraction of what is going on under the water. without that information it makes it

difficult for marine park managers to have a mature understanding of what is going on, and where they need to direct that time, management, resources and people. but they are still weather dependent. too strong a current, and the poor little ranger can be thrown violently off course. for all their ingenuity, isn't the relatively small work being done by these botsjust a drop in the ocean? the great barrier reef is facing many threats. there isn't going to be a silver bullet solution. but the ranger bot is just one step in that part we can take in terms of trying to make sure that we can look after the great barrier reef on a local level while the world gets its act together on climate change. that was nick in queensland. that is all from our sustainability special from babcock ranch here in florida. we are staying in the united states

for another week. next week we fly up to boston, home of mit, which always offers up plnety of very, very cool innovations. looking forward to that. in the meantime, we live on twitter. thank you for watching, and we will see you soon. temperatures into the low 205 in the south today, a nudge up on yesterday, further north, a little warmer, with more cloud. everywhere had a bit more cloud, hazy 5un5hine becau5e had a bit more cloud, hazy 5un5hine because of the high cloud, you can 5ee because of the high cloud, you can see here at porti5head, little cloud, more than high cloud around,

thi5 cloud, more than high cloud around, this will continue, by day and by night, virtually no weather 5y5tem5 around except the far north, where the jets 5cream i5. —— jet5 5cream. high—pre55ure building temperature by day and night. acr055 most of the uk. you can see the cloud earlier, 5lightly thicker here, rain and drizzle acr055 5lightly thicker here, rain and drizzle across the western northern 15le5 drizzle across the western northern isles of scotland, and sutherland, but as we go through the night, tending to move its way up towards the north and get cr055 acr055 tending to move its way up towards the north and get cr055 across the northern 15le5. —— get stuck acr055 the northern 15le5. cooler here, further south, not quite as chilly a5 further south, not quite as chilly as recent night5, dawn mi55ed will clear quickly. —— mi55ed. high—pre55ure centred over the country, lot5 high—pre55ure centred over the country, lots of sunshine around, very little breeze, northerly breeze may bring cloud onto east anglian coa5tline5, that is a little change oi'i coa5tline5, that is a little change on today, and sometimes, le55 cloud, so on today, and sometimes, le55 cloud, so temperatures here will be two or

three degrees higher. belfa5t i5 so temperatures here will be two or three degrees higher. belfa5t is up to 22. further south, nudging up, gentle breeze around the coasts, 5ea breeze 5et gentle breeze around the coasts, 5ea breeze set up, so it will be a little more refreshing, eventually, the cloud clear5 away from shetland. clearing night, cooler night, on the whole, temperatures will 5ta rt clearing night, cooler night, on the whole, temperatures will start from a higher night —— note, it will be in the countryside, temperature in town5 in the countryside, temperature in towns and cities levelling up in the south. monday doe5 towns and cities levelling up in the south. monday does bring the risk of a little more cloud into the far north, but again, doe5 a little more cloud into the far north, but again, does not look like it will produce much whether, 5hould be reasonably dry and bright and 5till be reasonably dry and bright and still quite warm and temperatures nudging up to the mid—205 a5 still quite warm and temperatures nudging up to the mid—205 as well, even for scotland and northern ireland. heat, hot weatherwill become all widespread acr055 ireland. heat, hot weatherwill become all widespread across the whole of the uk as we go through the week, i'm sure it is pipping 30 cel5iu5, with the heatwave to come,

hot by day, increasingly warm by night. this is bbc news. i'm annita mcveigh. the headlines at 4... thousands of people are marching through london to demand a vote on the final deal on the uk's departure from the eu. brexit is not inevitable. it is not a done deal. keep standing up for what you believe in and make sure mps over there can hear your voice is today and everyday. senior cabinet ministers stress the uk is still prepared to walk away from brexit talks without a deal. an explosion rocks a stadium in zimbabwe where president emmerson mnangagwa was addressing thousands of people — officials say he wasn't injured. also coming up... tackling the devastating impact of plastic pollution. sir david attenborough launches a new campaign, and says he's been "astonished" by the response to the blue planet series.