hello this is bbc news with me, julian worricker. the latest headlines. agrichemicals giant bayer monsanto insists that its weedkillers are safe to use, despite the verdict of an american court that they caused a man's cancer. an airline employee who stole an empty passenger plane from seattle airport is thought to have died after crashing on a nearby island. a 29—year—old man is killed and another man is seriously injured after an explosion at a military hardware factory in wiltshire. officials in australia's most populous state, new south wales, say the army could be deployed to help farmers as the worst drought in living memory continues to take its toll. now on bbc news, the click team take a look at the latest summer gadgets, go on a virtual reality waterslide adventure and even take a hoverboard for a spin. this week, it's a summer sizzler with wheels, slides and a very scary chicken.

the sun is shining, the temperature‘s soaring, and the robomows are mowing. the science says we are going to have more and more of this weather in the future and fortunately, the uk heatwave is less punishing than in much of the rest of the world so we have done the typically british thing of dressing inappropriately and letting our robots get on with the work. they do know this is astroturf, don't they? i'm afraid the heat has finally got

to us, so this week we are cracking open the summer gadgets, and the legs, sorry about those. first thing we need to do is fire up the barbie and forget coal, forget gas, this is the gosun go. it is a solar—powered cooker. it has a parabolic mirror here which focuses the sun's rays onto this central tube where the temperature can as high as 280 degrees celsius. it's got a stopper here so you can fill it with water if you fancy tea on the go. we have loaded it with lunch so we will see how it is doing a bit later. and while we wait to see if the steak browns before i do, stephen beckett has been cooling off, the only way he knows how. welcome to therme erding, nestled in germany's bavarian countryside, one of the largest thermal baths in europe, the perfect place to relax, have a drink,

maybe do a little pool yoga. oh, and did i mention, there's also 27 water slides? there's a water slide, there's another one, that's a water slide too. yes, this is also europe's biggest water slide park. but with 4,500 people visiting here every day, is 27 slides enough? what if you could change the slides at the flick of a switch? it's time to get my swimming trunks on for some serious journalism. to go on one of the newest rides in the park, i will need more than my togs and a tube, though, i will need one of these. i'm going backwards!

yes! whoa! it was actually amazing. i was a bit sceptical. i think i need a bit of practice, i was going backwards and forwards and didn't feel totally in control. essentially, i went down that slide with my eyes shut. i am no slide connoisseur, but that was a pretty good slide. and because it's a vr slide, how about sliding through the snowy mountains, outer space, or this alien planet? that's four virtual slides all packed into the twists and turns of one real slide. sometimes people, especially older ones say, i like it more without glasses, because they are overloaded with the system, but the young people, the kids and the young peoples and families we have here, about 10—29, they like it and they love it and they say it's the best thing they ever did in their life and so now we get about more than 50,000 visitors used --the vr.

normal landblubbing vr headsets have already got a bit of a rep for being complicated to use so getting the aquatic version to work well every day was has a big challenge. it was very difficult, the first thing we have to convince the owner that we want to do it. and we made the first tries, and then the owner of the therme erding tried it and after two tries, he was sick and he said, "no, i don't like this, "i don't want." because the difficulties if you go on the slide in the left side and in virtual reality, you go on the right side, you get this motion sickness. and to see how they solved that problem, first we need to get rid of some of this water. all along this slide are these sensors and that is so the virtual

reality headset knows exactly where you are at exactly the right time because you want what you're seeing to be the same as what you're feeling. get it wrong and you could end up feeling a little bit sick. stephen greenwood and his team spent months building and crucially testing the system. we did hundreds of tests going down the slide, each one of us has ridden the slide hundreds of times, because we had to make sure that we got it right. just off for a dip. stephen's next plan is to take the vr offers slides and into the wild. so this is a diving mask version of the same thing i tried earlier. there's a phone in there, so you've got a virtual reality headset. you can also dive. the idea of this is that people need to practise diving, like oil rig repairers or even astronauts, can train in one of these, but i'm just going to go to a shipwreck. when you combine that sensory feeling of being in a different environment and that virtual world over your eyes, it's a powerful combination. i think there is a huge potential

for military and marine technician training. these prototypes still need some work. for me, the image wasn't perfect and, more importantly, the waterproof phone that is hidden inside only knows where you're looking, not where you're moving. solving that problem is the next big challenge and in terms of the slide, well, they've got plans for that too. we are considering adding more features like sound and other sensory elements. i think there is a big therapeutic factor, there is a lot that we can do with physical therapy, meditation, rehabilitation, and some of the psychological benefits that you can have from just floating in water and having a relaxing experience in front of your eyes. it sounds like this could just be the start of aquatic vr. until then, though, i think the best i can do isjust help out with the testing. wow, steve, that seemed like a really tough assignment. it was hard, i won't lie, it was difficult, i did it for you guys. well done for getting through it.

so you've done a lot of work with vr over the last two or three years and it seems at the moment we are talking more about vr coming to these theme park areas than to the living room. the thing is, headsets are still quite expensive, they are getting cheaper but they are quite expensive and are still difficult to use so in a theme park environment, it can be controlled and managed and this is the thing, not everyone has a roller—coaster or a water slide in their home. that's true, yeah. it does seem that adds to the experience, doesn't it? it adds to the senses because vr doesn't do that at the moment. the promise of vr that we see in sci—fi films is that vr will totally immerse us but at the moment, vr only fools two senses, oui’ eyes and oui’ ears, and it doesn't do that particularly well so maybe this is the first step to fooling our other senses, our sense of motion, the sense of touch. did you enjoy it, stupid question? i did enjoy it. i had reservations about going down down the slide with my eyes closed but once you get over that,

it's fun, it's good. well done, take a long deserved break, it was arduous. it's been hard. we've been in the water — time to go for a bike ride now. gone are the days when you could slap on a cycling helmet, and pootle around the roads and the cycle paths. these days you have to load up with the latest cycling tech. it's the law, and that's what lara lewington has been doing with the help of click‘s own boss, simon. meet simon — a regular cyclist and the editor of click. first off is the coros smart cycle helmet. it connects your mobile phone via bluetooth and thanks to phone conduction technology, you can hear any sound from your phone — that can be directions or music — without blocking out the sound of the road around you. be safe. thank you. it can be controlled via a remote or its app which allows you to save routes and share data with friends. it also has a wind—resistant

microphone designed for calls if you consider chatting on the phone while cycling is a good idea, that is. we had a nice chat on the phone there, the sound was amazing. it was so clear. definitely the best thing i've tried on a bike like that, just in terms of the quality of the call. with this, you've got the added dimension of making sure that the bone conduction things are in exactly the right place. it's quite a feeling. getting jawbone right is always a difficult and with this, really after a couple of weeks of trying to perfect it to get the perfect signal, you kind of have to get it so tight you are almost garrotting yourself. when you are in the middle of london and there is loads of traffic, it's kind of difficult to hear, i suppose, but i guess some people would say, it's better to hear the traffic than it is the music anyway. this is r—pur, an antipollution mask for cyclists and motorcyclists.

the replaceable filters claim to to keep pollution, pollen and viruses and bacteria at bay and based on where you've been cycling, the app will access pollution data and figure out when you need to replace the filter. you look slightly menacing in that. it's also 30 degrees in london today. it's pretty hot, yeah. it's better than some i have tried, i have to say, in that regard. it's a lot more comfortable than some. i've tried before and it's a slightly nicer design, perhaps. that said, it's very expensive compared to other masks. how about the idea that it connects to an app and aims to track the pollution that you're going to be encountering? to me, that sounds like a classic bit of tech overdesign. really, i think you can use common—sense a little bit to know when to change filters. finally, we have blinkers which are claimed to be the next generation of bike lights.

they can shine a laser light in the street and they also provide the normal functions you'd expect from a light. but the question is — are they any better? they are all yours to give a go. so the conclusion? you've got the brake light, which lights up as you slow down, presumably because it's got an accelerometer, which is really impressive and when you're a cyclist, you do worry that people not noticing when you're coming to a halt. left—right indicators — there are so few cyclists who use that as a method of indication. i don't think i've ever seen any, to be honest, and the instructions say, don't rely on this on its own, you've also got to use your arm. i'd worry that i'd have too much stuff to think about, almost. that would concern me. they are very, very bright lights. there is almost an arms race in cycle lights these days —

they get brighter and brighter — and these are very impressive in daylight. hello, and welcome to the week in tech. it was the week google released its latest operating system, the android pie. indian ride—hailing app 0la revealed plans to move to the uk by the end of 2018. and it looks like master chief will be getting his own tv show. showtime announced a halo live action series will go into production next year. it was also the week that alex jones and infowars were deleted from several places on the internet. companies like facebook, youtube and apple removed the conspiracy theorist from their platforms for using hate speech. twitter, however, didn't follow suit, stating that he hadn't violated its rules. facebook debuted their ar messenger games this week, allowing users to play games in group chat. it does, however, seem to bear a striking resemblance to snapchat‘s snappables, which launched earlier this year. harvard researchers have developed small, squishy spider robots called microfluidic origami for reconfigurable pneumatic hydraulic devices, or morph for shot.

the eight—legged box body is made entirely from silicon and fluids are pumped into its legs to make it move. the team hope these kind of micro—bots could be used for delicate surgery in the future. and finally, researchers have taught an ai how to dribble. no, not like a baby — a basketball. the team from carnegie mellon university and deepmotion inc used motion capture and deep reinforcement learning to improve the skills of their virtual player. slam dunk. no summer party is complete without a warm bottle of red wine. now, did you know if you open a bottle of wine and you don't finish it within a week, which apparently is possible, the air that gets into the wine starts to turn it, and it doesn't taste as good. instead, you might like to use the coravin wine pourer which you clamp to the bottle. this only works if it's got a cork,

not a screw—top on the top so what you do is you clamp it there and drive a thin needle through the cork and into the bottle and when it's time to pour, this thing pumps argon gas into the wine bottle instead of air and that lets the liquid out, but then there's no air in the bottle to make the wine go bad. then, when you take it off, rather violently, there is pretty much no hole in the cork, so the wine doesn't come out. what a corker. cheers. i tell you, the views from the top ofjohn lewis here in oxford street are pretty spectacular, but they're nothing compared to what we have next for you. 0ne daredevil is taking grand

vistas to an entirely new height, literally. nick kwek went to marseille to meet him. that's right, i have popped down to france to poke about a frenchman's garage. we're in our office, our workshop. it's where we do all our research and development. a formerjet ski world champion, franky zapata has been at the forefront of water—powered vehicles for decades. he has been beavering away for years on several airborne inventions. i started with this prototype in 2011. then we build the real one. two years after, i got the idea of the hoverboard. and then we got the idea to create the flyboard. this is self balancing. you just press the trigger and you fly. but recently he has developed a penchant for rocket fuel. this bad boy has five jet engines

packed tightly together to blast franky into the stratosphere. well, maybe not that high, but it can reach a top speed of 110mph. we have a plan b for everything. plan a, plan b, plan c for electronics. and you can lose an engine. so if one of these five engines blows... it's still flying. you can lose two engines and keep flying. the explosion would be contained by some kevlar protection. the explosion? if it explodes. it can hold somebody weighing up to 100 kilos at 500 feet to six minutes. at $250,000 a pop, surely frank's quids in, then. it's not something that we plan to sell. why not? if i tried this today what would happen? this one?

yes. today? you would kill yourself. right. a wired hand—held joystick lets him control his yaw and thrust, but it's his body which supplies the real power. to stay on the board for more than one to two minutes you have to be able to absorb a 2g force, with 25 kilos on your back. no problem. you need about 1,000 hours on that. the balance is the same as the water flyboard, but 20 times more. how hard can it be? yeah! oh, yes!

yelps. i must train about five days a week, doing some kind of crosstraining. just to be able to resist with the stress that you have in your leg. as well, he has also developed the easyboard, a version with sticks, currently being trialled by the us military. we did some tests with the us military. that was the first soldier we trained. the flyboard is more like a demonstrator. that's my baby, you know? it's my roman suit. tony stark. i can hear thejets firing up now. franky is ready to take off. he's off! look at him go! that's amazing. see you later, i'm off on a hoverboard. and how does it feel when you are up

there, flying around? it's just out of this world. one of the best things i ever did in my life. to be able to do this you do have to be ultra—specialist and physically brilliant. so for me, that means sitting back happily on terra firma, enjoying the beautiful marseille coastline, with a man flying around my head. i'm getting a selfie. camera shutter clicks. right, time to see how lunch is doing, and i'm going to test the temperature of our steak using a meat thermometer. not any old meat thermometer, of course. this is the meater, which of course talks to my smartphone. via the app, you can tell it what you're cooking, what your desired temperature is, and it will monitor the temperatures for you.

it will alert you when you're medium, well done, or rare—ing to go. not long later the steak is really well done indeed. i hope you like the nail varnish i had time to apply while waiting. coughs. now, from steak to chicken. stay with me on this. because dave lee has been touring silicon valley to look at how some tech professionals are choosing to unwind. across california there are as many as 60,000 chicken coops. lots of them are here in silicon valley. many are owned by techies because owning chickens has become something of a status symbol. down there is one, they have one as well. we will hear more from him later. now, i've just arrived at my first stop. heather's role at herjob is to help top tech executives communicate with each other. when she comes home, she communicates with her chickens. hey, girls. come here. it's like digital detox. it's about as far from tech as you can get. it takes you back to the farmland.

my parents, my dad grew up on a dairy farm. this is a nice reminder of when i was a kid, back on the farm. this coop is a place of real luxury, a property in keeping with the mega homes that surround it. we built an irrigation system that connects to the sprinklers. we never had to fill up the water. so it kind of looks after itself? yeah. we fill up the feeding tubes in the back about once every ten days. and then it's just scooping poop and holding the chickens. they love to be held. isn't she lovely? her children are, of course, fully paid—up members of the smartphone generation. but they have a lot of time

for their fowl friends. it's about the only thing that gets them outside. hello, johan. hello. how is it going? i have come to see your chickens. yes, please. johan's dayjob has him of the cutting edge of self—driving car technology, but when he gets home he likes to get his hands dirty. when you are working, not looking after the animals, what is a typical day? long days, intense days, lots of pressure. we want to do a lot, we have ambitious plans. it requires hard work to achieve this. johan shares his home with a wife, four children, five sheep, 13 chickens. you are living in a part of the world were the latest technology is readily available and people are worried about how looped into that we are. how important is it to ensure the kids get a sense of the real world? very important, right? it is easy for them to just get caught up in this area, where there is a lot

of pressure, school, whatnot. looking after the chickens and selling eggs to the neighbours, at least the ones who don't have their own chickens, is all about considering the value of removing tech from these kids‘ lives, if only for a small part of each day. i can see the appeal to looking after chickens. getting back to nature. realising what is important. and for people in the tech business, it seems to really help. for people in the journalism business, not so much. i've got to put him down. he is going to peck me like crazy. go away! that was dave lee, re—cooperating — coop, you see, — in silicon valley. i've never seen anybody as scared of a chicken as he was. that's all from our summer sizzler. i hope you've enjoyed it as much as we did. we live on facebook and twitter as well. now, after such an intense summer of sport, next week we are going to look back at some of the new technology that has been brought into play in the last few months. and we will leave you with one more thing, which we hope illustrates the perils of filming someone going down a vr water slide. enjoy this.

0ur cameraman nick kwek certainly did. this isn't working at all! laughter hello there, we've seen some contrasts east— west across the country during the day, while the cloud has been increasing from the west we have kept the blue skies and the sunshine in the east and this is proof of that, beautiful scene here in cromer in norfolk taken by one of our weather watchers earlier. these clearer skies will cloud over as we head through tonight and we'll see low—pressure spilling some rain from west to east through the rest of the weekend but it won't be a write—off, there will be a bit of sunshine as well. this is how things look. over the past few hours we have had cloud pushing across wales,

southern and south—west england and also for the north west of scotland as well, but we will keep some of those clearer skies as we head into the evening, particularly across parts of north—east england, through this evening and tonight that rain will work further north and east across the uk. so some showers across many parts of england and wales, northern ireland and southern scotland also seeing showers as well but with all that cloud it's a much milder more humid feeling night, compared to last night, temperatures in the mid—teens for most of us, just a bit cooler and fresh across the northern half of scotland. but as we move through into sunday we've got this area of low pressure that's in the driving seat through the day tomorrow, that will bring a fairly unsettled picture with some outbreaks of rain at times. that rain will be pushing into parts of southern and the south—east of england during the middle part of sunday morning. we'll also see rain lingering for our part of the day across central scotland, slow—moving outbreaks of white patchy rain. a return to sunnier skies from the west, we'll also see a few

showers, some for wales and the south—west of england could be heavy with mixed hail and under and hit and miss with sunny spells and try whether in between. through monday we will keep some of that showery rain to parts of scotla nd that showery rain to parts of scotland and also on the east coast of england, it does look like as if this pressure moves to the east, higher pressure building from the south—west, and improved day for wales, south—west england and from northern ireland showers should clear with temperatures from 15 to 23 degrees or so. looking ahead through tuesday into wednesday still u nsettled through tuesday into wednesday still unsettled for through tuesday into wednesday still u nsettled for scotla nd through tuesday into wednesday still unsettled for scotland and northern ireland, breezy with showers and times, things will be drier and it will warm up towards the middle of the week into england and wales. goodbye for now. this is bbc news, i'm julian worricker. the headlines at four. agrochemicals giant bayer monsanto, insists that its weedkillers are safe to use, after an american jury ruled that they caused a man's cancer. an airline employee who stole

an empty passenger plane from seattle airport is thought to have died after crashing on a nearby island. a 29—year—old man is killed and another man is seriously injured after an explosion at a military hardware factory in wiltshire. a warning the australian army could be deployed in new south wales — to help farmers deal with the worst drought in living memory and mission to the sun on hold: nasa is forced to postpone one of its most daring ventures until tomorrow because of technical problems.