if the vest can take it away, because it's doing some of the work for them, that's the positive. is this a step towards the robots taking over? i think we are a bit away off that yet. there are new technologies and we know the construction industry needs to modernise. exoskeletons are already hard at work in america, reducing fatigue on ford's busy production lines. not everyone is a fan. some are worried this tech will give bosses an excuse to demand longer hours and push for a later retirement age. and when tested in a battlefield simulation, researchers found exoskeleton wearers were slower to react. there is no lack of focus back in the west country, where even young workers are keen to embrace their robotic assistants. but exoskeleton tech is still in its infancy, and the next generation of mechanised sidekicks mightjust decide to do away with their masters. let's ta ke

let's take a look at the weather prospects. it has been a cloudy day gci’oss prospects. it has been a cloudy day across the board with limited spells of sunshine in eastern areas but further west the rain clouds are gathering and further showers throughout the overnight period. turning chilly across scotland but further south breezy and mild. rain heavily in places, england and will sustain weight but scotland and northern ireland, it will be drier. freezing temperatures in places and showers turning wintry over the scottish hills. tomorrow start cold in the north, early ice. plenty of sunshine for scotland and northern ireland, is gradually transverse southwards, although the south—east of england will remain quite cloudy, breezy and mild. to the north temperatures well down into single

figures. tuesday will be chilly across the board. wet windy and mild again, particularly in england and wales, for wednesday. hello this is bbc news. the headlines: environment secretary michael gove says theresa may's brexit deal isn't perfect but is the only choice. labour say they'll call for a vote of no confidence if mps reject the deal, and say the government must publish its legal advice tomorrow. there are boos from the public as president macron visits the scene of riots in paris. he warns a state of emergency could be reimposed in france. teachers must not be expected to act as substitute parents, according to the chief inspector of schools. now on bbc news, leejohnson goes in search of starlite, a material appearing to have incredible heat—resistant

properties, and finds out more about its mysterious inventor. in 1990, a remarkable material appeared on the bbc science and technology programme, tomorrow's world. i'm going to leave this torch blowing on this egg for a couple of minutes, and it ought to survive the inferno because it's coated with a remarkable new plastic. the substance appeared to have incredible heat resistant properties. the egg hasn't even begun to start cooking. its apparent uses were countless. the tests that i, in fact, did, indicated that it was better than anything else that i'd seen. big industry was soon clamouring to discover more about this wonder product. the material, christened starlite, was all the more miraculous as its creator, maurice ward, a ladies' hairdresser from the north of england, had no formal chemical training. he'd stumbled on a wonderful invention, it wasn't through being a sophisticated scientist.

it's incredible that this material that's painted on could be so powerful. despite huge interest from nasa, boeing and the ministry of defence, starlite never left the laboratory. no. we don't, we don't supply you the formulation. maurice died in 2011 without ever revealing the formula, but did starlite‘s secrets die with him? was starlite nothing more than an intriguing party trick? or could this apparently incredible material still save countless lives? maurice and starlite first came to my attention back injune 2010. he phoned me up, out of the blue, saying he had a solution to the bp oil crisis in the gulf of mexico. i was a rookie reporter at the time covering local issues, but there was something about maurice and his story that really grabbed me.

intrigued, i set out to meet him to find out more. i'm just an inventor that plays around, and i do it quite different to the normal sort of person. that product was starlite, a material that looks and feels like a combination of metal and plastic and, says its creator, can withstand 75 nuclear blasts. we did it with an egg on tomorrow's world. although it looked red hot, he could pick it up with his bare hands, and that, of course, created a great deal of interest from right round the world. that would be my sole encounter with maurice. i left his workshop on the family farm wondering if his claims added up. who was was this mysterious figure and how did he come to discover starlite? tell us about maurice then, your dad. what was he like? a very eccentric man. liked his own way, had a mind of his own and nobody could tell him. a lot of people didn't get on with him because, i think, the way he was. well, maurice was a —

of course he was a very elegant looking chap, white hair, white beard, turned out nicely. i was very fond of maurice. he had a complicated character, which was engaging to people like me. to some extent, he was an otherworldly sort of character. after short spells in the police and at a chemicalfirm, maurice opened a ladies' hair salon. he started off in hairdressing, he was very successful. he did paul daniels' and lots of other people, travelled the world, brought colouring and perming into the country in the sixties. maurice was a big showman, and he loved being the centre of attention. as a hairdresser, it's said ward often referred to himself as "maurice of paris". and while he was doing hairdressing, he used to make his own wigs. and cos he used to do all the fibres for the hair, i think this is where the scientist stuff came in. maurice had an interest in chemicals and materials and tinkered

in his makeshift lab, but it was a tragic accident that would focus his mind. newsreel: the worst british air disaster for 13 years. 5a people are killed at manchester airport, trapped in a burning plane. there was a big aviation disaster in manchester. a lot of people were killed, and people died from fumes, not from the fire itself. and so, maurice was trying to come up with a product which would deal with that. he was burning rubbish in his back garden and he happened to, in fact, notice that part of it didn't burn, itjust did not burn. so he tried to use oxy gas torches, and it still didn't burn. so maurice essentially discovered starlite completely by accident? he discovered a potential version of it completely by accident, yes. maurice took his wonder material to the television programme, tomorrow's world. the broadcast was pivotal in sparking the interest that quickly grew. peter mccann is the presenter

who conducted the test. tomorrow's world theme plays. that's the old music that set the pulse racing. i was presenting the tomorrow's world programme, which was the bbc‘s flagship science programme throughout the ‘805 really. 0n the actual day of the performance, we would go through the script and we would see how it turned out. it was with some trepidation that i went over there and gingerly fingered it to start with, to see if i was going to get scalded and blistered as i picked this thing up, but to my amazement, it really was pretty cool. it was still warm, but it was not red hot like it had been a few seconds before. so on the actual take, i was able go to it with fair confidence that i could actually just pick it up straightaway, but that wasn't the case on the rehearsal, i can tell you. tomorrow's world: what's more the egg hasn't even begun to cook...

and it was raw inside. amazing. it wasjustjawdropping. maurice was a very secretive sort of person. i said to him "what is in this product?" and he said "i've never told anybody yet and i'm not likely to tell you." we've come to london today to meet with mark miodownik. now, he's a materials scientist and engineer at university college london. he's a bit of a professor of stuff, and he's got a bit of a history with starlite, he's done tests on it in the past, and we're going to ask him what properties starlite has that makes it so resistant to extreme heat. oh yeah, here we go. in 2012, maurice‘s daughters brought starlite to mark's lab. yeah, this is an exciting moment, my first real test of starlite in my own lab.

i just didn't know what to expect. what is sta rlite? starlite is a paint, like a white, viscous liquid. once it's set hard, if you apply heat, and we applied a blowtorch to it, the material itself chars and becomes carbon and it — and that then becomes this expanding foam of carbon. now, carbon is a very high melting point material, it's incredibly thermally resistant, and so you have this, this very low—density foam, made pf a very high temperature resistant material, and it happens very quickly. so it's a kind of magic material. it's a thin paint, but then it becomes quite a thick, chunky, insulated material. but look at that, i mean, you know, a material that can withstand a blowtorch for that period of time, it's an impressive material. maurice‘s masterstroke of taking starlite on tomorrow's world soon attracted the attention of companies and governments. 18 months after appearing

on the programme, the ministry of defence convinced the inventor to allow them to run a series of tests. one of the nice points about being in science often, you, in fact, go down on the beach, you, in fact, turn over rocks and then something's underneath those rocks that's quite, quite different. starlite was very, very different. i was the kind of guy, i guess, that they used to come to and ask how does this work? what makes it tick?, as it were. keith was particularly interested in how starlite would perform against high—powered lasers. what was interesting is it changed only down to the depth that it needed to to deal with the heat pulse that was put on it. the bigger the heat pulse, the better starlite worked. initially he'd, in fact, want to come in and be there while tests were, in fact, done. later on, he i think

gave me samples, which he, in fact, left in my care, provided i could take them back to him afterwards. but he knew that i didn't actually analyse them. the mod test results showed starlite was something they hadn't seen before, and now nato was also interested. it wanted to know if starlite could withstand a nuclear explosion. further tests were carried out at the atomic weapons establishment in foulness in the uk, and the white sands missile range in new mexico. some of the tests that were done, they used a four kilotonne simulant. is it, is it nuclear blast resistant? it's thermal blast resistant — if it doesn't get torn to bits. how serious was the mod about sta rlite? i think we knew at the time it was a game changer overall. the tests that i, in fact, did, also indicated that it was better than, in fact, anything else that i'd, in fact, seen.

starlite had great potential. government agencies and businesses were queueing up to work with maurice, but would he be willing to share his secret with them? maurice had produced a material that appeared to have numerous applications. military, industry, even space travel were all possibilities. why, why have we not heard more of this, you know, so—called miraculous substance? it's a very different skill set, inventing a material or, in fact, accidentally inventing a material and building a business out of it. those are in a sense two completely separate things, and i think he either couldn't do the second thing or he didn't have someone around who he trusted to do the second thing. and so, it became just a curiosity, this material, because it never made the leap into a commercial material. i haven't seen any agreements as yet... no, i've brought you. 0k...

yeah, yeah. 0k, i'd like to see it, so talk to the attorneys and... yeah. but, you know, we've got to have the agreements in place. yes. all we're saying really is that i'm protecting my material, and you ain't gonna pinch it. mm—hm, mm—hm. no, no, i say, exactly, yeah. that's right. he was also reluctant to tell people what was actually in starlite. because they wanted to steal it, and if he'd given them the information, he'd have been nobody, he'd have no protection. they could just say well, they manufactured it, they invented it. he used to play mind games with people. he used to have different bits of ingredients laid around, but it wouldn't be the proper stuff, because he didn't trust anyone. trust was a huge stumbling block then? he wanted it to help people, but he wanted the control as well. i think he was out of his depth. largely because he had something there that could easily have big, very, very big. he was being very cautious about what happens when you actually publish patents.

if i had gone that route, then the next thing is it's published, and for the appropriate fee anybody in the world can buy the copy of the patent, and the unscrupulous ones would try and copy and imitate it and it has to be fully set out, it is not something where you just sketch it, it has to be fully set out, and anybody with an average intelligence would be able to reproduce. maurice had a problem. his material was worthless without identifying a clear use for it. if he wanted to capitalise on his invention he would have to divulge was in it. we have a materials library with thousands of these samples in it. most of them are not out there. they just haven't found their place in the world yet. we have shape memory alloys, we have magnetic liquids, they have all been invented by people but they haven't quite

made it into our lives because they don't quite actually do something we all need and want to pay for. that's not to say they won't in the future. his end goal was in fact to get something like £10 billion dumped on him so that he could just do it. no one is going to do that. i thought you said billion. i did, i did. he wanted 10 billion? i've heard numbers like that mentioned. maurice‘s stubborn nature is illustrated in this extraordinary clip from a 1994 bbc documentary. here his daughter carrie responds to an off—the—cuff question from the programme makers. man: what would you do if it was your invention? i would try and sell it out to the best deal i could get for it, by contacting all the people that have been interested in starlite up until now. and how would you do that? how would you actually deal with them, being that you have been in all these high—powered meetings and seen all these executives, how would they try and deal with it.

i would have to make sure i was paid fully for it first before they got anything. before they got any formulation. money through the bank. all signed up with all belonging to the family. yeah, as long as we had the money in our hands, yes. yeah, that sounds interesting, doesn't it? what would you do with £2 million? don't you think you've undersold it? it would be better than nothing. not as good as ten! well, you haven't got ten yet. he was a very controlling, argumentative person. but that's who he is. and i think if he wasn't the eccentric person he would never have invented it. he was a showman, that is a very important part of any business that you try and grow, you invent something and then you have to get people on board. all these investors, they have many different ways to spend their money, and you have to convince them that your material is the best way to spend the money. you need of bravado, you need a demo, and he had them, so brilliant, his egg demo,

like surely it's the best demo ever for a new material. i can't think of a better one. he invented something, he had that mind, he had the ability to show it off and get people really excited about it. ijust don't think he had the business head, and that's to have all those in one person, that usually doesn't happen. maurice passed away in 2011. some believe he took the secret of starlite to the grave. that hasn't deterred others from trying to replicate it. the truth about starlite is that it is something that you could potentially knock up forms of using a product which you can get in your own home. and you yourself have made a batch of starlite?

i have made a batch of, not what i call starlite, but i have knocked up something. notice it is getting red hot in the middle, and notice i am still holding this metal plate. there is no gas produced. when i take it away... yeah, it is warm isn't it, but it is not red hot by any stretch. this is made using regular household products. carrie, do me a favour, would you feed those other rabbits for me... i fed them yesterday. well, feed them again today, will you. maurice‘s plans would have been based on what he had in his home during at that point in time. what i then said was, in my home i have this and that and that. if i do this and that, what does that lead to?

does it lead to anything novel? what would a hairdresser have at home, then, he would presumably have hair gels, mousse, hairspray, are we close? did he make wigs also? i believe he did. so he would have had glue and things too. so you think that could have been used? could have been. it is white, so it could have been something as simple as pva glue? i'm not going to go down that path. laughs. but if you look at published papers, people have used pva glue for these kind of applications. what's in sta rlite? can't tell you that. not one ingredient? nope. is there pva glue in it? can't tell you that. you have a formula for it which your dad passed on to you. just tell us where you are up

to with that, and what you want to try and do with starlite? we do want to bring it to the open market. you should be able to buy it on a shelf. this is what we're trying to do, put it into paint so people can paint their own houses. first off, let me say we are pleased to see the bbc taking up the story of maurice ward, whose amazing genius became groundbreaking research. we heard about a us company, thermashield, through keith lewis. one of the partners in that firm first contacted maurice back in 2008 and bought the intellectual rights to starlite in october 2013. that included notes, test reports and samples from the boeing and white sands tests. we have been in touch with steve mink from thermashield and we asked him for an interview. he politely declined, saying the company was keeping a low profile until they are ready to launch the product. but he did send us a video

statement and some footage from their very own egg test. thermashield produced samples, we built high—powered laser attacks at power densities far exceeding prior laser testing. also an 18—year—old legacy sample from the boeing test cycles sustained equivalent laser attacks without a mark, proving its performance, stability over time. steve talks about how they are looking to use starlite for very similar applications as those identified by maurice, nikki and others. in america you have a company called thermashield, your mother and another sister sold them a formula. that formula isn't as good as what we have got. you are saying you have some sort of super—strength sta rlite? yes. it is not about having it and putting it all together, you have got to put it together in certain stages. and if you don't know how to do that it won't work.

there are now many, many of these paints out there called intumescent paints, if you look at them on the internet you will see a lot of companies making a lot of money out of this. it already exists, starlite, not as a name brand but as a commercial entity, that paint exists. there are other paints, intumescent paints similar to starlite on the market, that people can go into shops and buy. why would they go in and buy starlite as opposed to one of those? because starlite will save your life. i know there is nobody else out there who has a formula like starlite. despite nikki's claims, herformula is yet to make it to the market. do you think you could ever get to the point where we can go to a shop and buy starlite? it would have to be a lot better than the competition for that business to grow, in my view. you need proper tests to be able to define that. if they can prove that they are going to do really well, and i would really be cheering,

i am cheering for them that that happens. i had not heard of anything which has been, which is so momentous in its application, and i think i would have done, i think we all would have done if it was out there. these days what people do is open source invention, and get the rest of the world to innovate around it. i think it would be a great legacy for maurice if the invention was just open sourced, and everyone could play around with it. as we followed the story of sta rlite we found it impossible to separate it from the story of its enigmatic creator. we have heard accounts of maurice‘s ingenuity and showmanship. but we have also learnt of his stubbornness and the frustrations of those who tried to work with him. so how should we remember maurice? the person who spots the new material at that moment of an accident, maybe, or because he is doing some experiments, is a special person. and, you know, it is sad to me that

that moment for maurice didn't end up with starlite in all of our lives, and i think it could have. if you take all the materials away from the world, all this stuff around us, we are just naked animals. the invention of materials and creating civilisation, that is what we do as humans. and so he was, he was as good as any on that front. in a way, the best thing about starlite is the story itself of maurice. his story tells you that it is possible to do something very novel, very new, in your own garage, and of the fact that anyone can invent something that could change the world. good afternoon. it has been cloudy

across the board with outbreaks of rain in western areas but cloud brea ks rain in western areas but cloud breaks further east we saw some sunshine. it remains breezy this evening and overnight across southern areas, further north lighter winds but the rain builds up across the coast and into western scotland. windy end across the south and into the night. anywhere will see cloud and showers as the night goes on. staying cloudy with further rain, breezy conditions across england and wales where it will be mild and turning chilly across scotla nd mild and turning chilly across scotland and the risk of ice. some showers wintry over the scottish mountains. this is the monday pressure chart. breezy over england and wales, north—westerly winds setting in across the north. the chilly start, early ice. some showers, wintry over higher ground,

but plenty of sunshine and a cold brighter weather head southwards into england and wales. not reaching south—eastern parts where it remains mild and cloudy compared to the north which will be quite chilly. the colder air winds out going into tuesday, quite a cold night, the cold est of tuesday, quite a cold night, the coldest of the week. the blue collars indicating that. short lived cold snap for england and wales is more mild air moves in. early tuesdayit more mild air moves in. early tuesday it will be cold. seems like this around the country with frost but plenty of sunshine. bright and sunny day for most, mist and fog clearing away. northern half of the countries should stay dry with sunshine throughout the afternoon but for england and wales cloud will move in ahead of the spec weather system. mild air into the south—west but for most it will be chilly. through tuesday night it turns wet

and windy across england and wales, some transient hill snow in central and northern areas. for wednesday morning it could be driven that morning it could be driven that morning commute for eastern england but the rain will clear and staying breezy and mild in the south through wednesday afternoon. across the north it stays chilly and bright. this is bbc news. the headlines at 5pm... environment secretary michael gove says theresa may's brexit deal isn't perfect but is the only choice. we have got to recognise that if we don't vote for this deal, the alternatives are no deal or no brexit. labour say they'll call for a vote of no confidence if mps reject the deal and say the government must publish its legal advice tomorrow. if they don't produce it tomorrow then we will start contempt proceedings. this will be a collision course between the government and parliament.

president macron is booed as he visits the scene of the worst riots in paris in years. a warning that the world is at a crossroads, as representatives from almost 200 countries gather in poland for talks on climate change.