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tv   Click  BBC News  August 12, 2018 3:30pm-4:01pm BST

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a cloudy day. there have been heavy showers and thunderstorms. some heel and heavy rain. some more reading to come gci’oss rain. some more reading to come across south—east parts of england. a mild night to come. 1415 degrees. tomorrow should be an improvement. there will be some rain in parts of scotland. the weather will improve from the south. there will be more sunshine for northern ireland, wales and southern england. temperatures will be up to 23 degrees. 1718 degrees and is gone. it should remain fairly unsettled. that should be drier towards the south—east. hello, this is bbc news. the headlines. police are treating a shooting
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in manchester's moss side area as attempted murder. ten people, including two children, were wounded. police say the injuries are serious but not life threatening. nasa's daring solar probe mission has successfully launched from cape canaveral in florida, after the launch was called off yesterday. the mission will analyse the sun's atmosphere for the first time. rail operator northern has cancelled around 80 train services across northwest england today — another sunday of disruption for thousands of passengers. cyclists could face a new charge of death by dangerous cycling if they kill pedestrians while riding — the department for transport is consulting on proposals. now on bbc news, the click team take a look at the latest summer gadgets, go on a virtual reality water slide adventure, and even take a hoverboard for a spin. this week, it's a summer sizzler with wheels,
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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 many places so we have done that british thing of dressing inappropriately and letting the robots do the work. they do know this is astroturf, don't they?
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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 going 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 some pool yoga.
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oh, and did i mention, there's also 27 waterslides? there's a water slide, there's another one, that's a water slide too. yes, this is also europe's biggest waterslide 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!
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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, server that was good. 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 than we are. normal landblubbing vr headsets have already got a bit of a rep for being compared to use so getting
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the aquatic version to work well has been a challenge. —— complicated to use. 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. plus 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 to solve 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 that wrong and you could end up feeling a little bit sick. stephen greenwood and his team spent months building
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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 equipment 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 of the eyes, it's a powerful combination. i think there is a huge potential for military and marine technician training. these prototypes
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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, it was difficult, i did it for you guys. 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
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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 themepark environment, it can be controlled and managed and this is the thing, not everyone has a rollercoaster or a waterslide 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 of the 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.
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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 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
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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,
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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 looks 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 commonsense 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 normalfunctions you'd expect from a lith but the question is, are they any better?
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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 today — they get brighter and brighter — and these are very impressive in daylight. . hello, and welcome to the week in tech.
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it was the week google released its latest operating system, the android pie. indian ride—hailing app ola 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 its ar messenger games this week, allowing people 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.
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the 8—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.
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this only works if it's got a cork, not a screwtop 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. 0ne daredevil is taking grand vistas to an entirely new height, literally. nick kwek went to marseille to meet him.
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that's right, i have popped down to france to poke about a frenchman's garage. we're in 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. 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
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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... 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... it's not something that we plan to sell. why not? if i tried this today what would happen?
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this one? 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 12 minutes you have to be able to absorb a 2 g force, with 25 kilos in the back. no problem. you need about 1,000 hours on that. the same as the water flyboard, but 20 times more. how hard can it be? yeah! oh, yes! yelping. about five days a week, doing some kind of crosstraining.
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just 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 iron man 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?
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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. 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. this is the meater, which of course talks to my smartphone. through the hour, 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. and not long later the steak
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is really well done indeed. i hope you like the nail polish i had time to apply while waiting. coughs. now, from steak to chicken. stay with me on this. 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, guys. come here. it's like digital detox. it's about as far from tech as you can get.
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it takes you back to the farmland. my parents, i 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 a chicken. 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
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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
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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 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 waterslide. enjoy this.
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0ur cameraman nick kwek certainly did. this isn't working at all! it's been a mixed fortunes day. this was the scene taken by one of our weather watchers, thick, grey clouds that will produce more rainfall as we sped through this afternoon and evening. for the week ahead still looking rather unsettled in the north and west in particular, fairly breezy and showery. the driest and warmest weather expected in the south east through the week ahead.
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here's the satellite and radar showing where we've had rain over the last few hours. it's been across parts of scotland, eastern england and heavy showers rolling into the west. into this evening we'll see showers and thunderstorms for northwest england, wales, the midlands, towards the south—west of england. some heavy showers so heavy rain falling england. some heavy showers so heavy rainfalling in england. some heavy showers so heavy rain falling in a short space of time means there could be surface water around. more rain to come across parts of the south—east of england and east anglia through the course tonight too. fairly cloudy and mild for most of us overnight with temperatures holding at around 14-15. to with temperatures holding at around 14—15. to start the new working week low pressure still in charge of things. we've got high pressure across the azores and it's trying to nudgein across the azores and it's trying to nudge in across the uk but we've still got weather fronts lingering across scotland and into eastern england are so another fairly cloudy picture on monday with some outbreaks of rain across parts of scotland. not particularly heavy but slow—moving. the heaviest showers will be towards yorkshire, into lincolnshire, sam hail, thunderand heavy downpours of rain likely here.
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further towards the south and south—west, higher pressure in charge with more sunshine than we've seen today and an improved picture for wales and south—west england, temperatures around 23, should be largely dry for northern ireland. 0n tuesday the next front works in across northern ireland into the west of scotland bringing some rain, perhaps rain into the northwest of england. further south and east across the uk you are more likely to stay dry through the day on tuesday and temperatures will be nudging up bya and temperatures will be nudging up by a degree or two. i is up to around 26 celsius in the south—east, 18-22 around 26 celsius in the south—east, 18—22 across scotland and northern ireland on tuesday. we'll continue to seem low—pressure in the north and northwest bringing showers to edinburgh and the northwest, mostly dry for cardiff edinburgh and the northwest, mostly dryfor cardiff and edinburgh and the northwest, mostly dry for cardiff and london and laughter and warmer middle part of the week it will turn cooler later in the week. goodbye. this is bbc news, i'm shaun ley. the headlines at four. police in manchester say a shotgun was likely used in a shooting in the city's moss side area last night, 10 people, including two childern, sustained
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pellet—type injuries. we have launched an investigation. it is attempted murder. discharging a firearm it is attempted murder. discharging afirearm in it is attempted murder. discharging a firearm in a crowded place such as this, many people would this will become injured. nasa's ambitious mission to the sun launches from cape canaveral , 24 hours after its launch was cancelled due to a last—minute hitch. thousands of passengers in the northwest of england face another sunday of rail disruption , as northern cancels around 80 services. cyclists who kill pedestrians could face a new charge of ‘death
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