voice—over: this is bbc news. we will have the headlines and all the main news stories for you at the top of the hour, straight after this programme. this week, a night—time ride around san francisco in the back of a driverless cab. take a seat in the back and close the doors. buckle up and get ready to ride. i'm just glad that was james, not me. meanwhile, spencer's been sniffing out the

secrets of a shipwreck. ooh, stale beer. he laughs is that you or me? definitely not me! and on the subject of smells... so this is the first—ever bbc click perfume. this is not nice. right. let's go for a ride. they've been a long time coming, but in the last few years we've watched self—driving cars get closer and closer. we've just pulled out in front of quite a fast—moving car there. we made it. i call that quite a human manoeuvre. not that it's always been a smooth ride, mind you. i'm holding on tight. oh, that's quite weird. but whatever the experience, one thing has been constant. whenever we've been in autonomous vehicles, we haven't been alone. there's always been someone with us to take over

in the case of an emergency, as the ais behind the wheel rack up enough miles to convince us all that they are ready for the road. and now, finally, there's a driverless taxi service that's taking paying customers. it's in san francisco and when we say driverless, we mean there is no driver at all, not even a safety driver. which i think must be a massive leap of faith for anyone getting into that car, right? and will generally just feel a bit weird. it certainly will. and that passenger for us was james clayton. here's what happened when he climbed into the backseat. wow. i think there's actually no, no—one in there. wow. this is incredible. laughing: oh, my god. on san francisco's streets, something straight out of a sci—fi film is happening. people are able to hail cabs with no driver. fully autonomous robo taxis. some love it. i cannot believe

this is happening. whoo! screaming laughter crazy! but others believe it's too soon for fully driverless cars to be on our streets. the public as a whole has not been provided with valid documentation that these vehicles are going to be safe. it's stopped in the middle of a lane. there's only one way to find out. get into one of these cars ourselves. the bbc was one of the first media organisations in the world to try it. is this it? oh, wow. wow. 0k. take a seat in the back and close the doors. buckle up and get ready to ride. start your... our plan for the evening is to go to some of san francisco's landmarks — the painted ladies, mrs doubtfire's house and haight—ashbury. no—one's telling us where to go. we can go wherever we want. it's really, really weird.

it isn't at, like, a racetrack or a testing facility. we are fully in the centre of san francisco. it's like going on a roller—coaster or something. that feeling before, where you just, you know, you're probably going to be fine, but it, it's still weird. er... what's going on here? so how does it negotiate this? i have to say, it's pretty conservative driving, like, we got to that stop first... ..and now we're going. so...erm... ..it�*s definitely cautious. and that's no accident. cruise's vice president of product oliver cameron tells me the cars are programmed to drive conservatively. on any of our cruise avs, we have lidar, we have radar

and we have cameras. and what we do is we fuse all those together using machine learning, and that gives us this amazing understanding of the world around us. by design, we're making our av extra cautious when it hits the roads. the problem was the system didn't always put me at ease. in fact, it made me pretty nervous. oh, the car's just stopped in the middle of the street. ooh. . .that. .. i'm glad you were filming that, because that was a reallyjerky left turn into the... ..into the other road. oh, this is interesting. ok, there's a bus in our lane and there are cars to our left. so what's it going to do? ooh, ooh. 0k. it's pulling out left. oh, another bus is coming out right. it really doesn't know what to do. oh, there's a car behind us. like, this isjust bad driving. this is... i was ready to love this and i'm definitely...

i'm definitely nervous. i'm a nervous passenger right now. one of the things i think is worth factoring is that our av makes different decisions than humans. in many cases our av makes humanlike decisions, but sometimes it makes decisions that are very precise, like a computer is making them, right? which is effectively what's happening. so that moment, although it felt dangerous, you're saying wasn't. the computer knew what it was doing. exactly. yes. correct. interesting. cruise, though, has been involved in a number of accidents in san francisco this year, most of them minor. however, after an accident injune, its software was recalled, and some believe it's too soon for real passengers to be driven around without a driver on urban streets. these vehicles are still somewhat in the test phase and cruise has decided to deploy them in certain areas where they will interact with the public. and we believe that, before manufacturers do that, they need to provide the public with some sort of transparent evidence that these vehicles aren't going to cause problems,

deaths or injuries on the road. but cruise insists its cars are safe. we're really proud of our safety record and we report continuously to our regulators, and safety, absolutely, is the top priority of cruise. we are six months into deploying this product, brand—new, game—changing product, and with that comes some early teething problems, right? so we take traffic into account, but we also take safety into account. cruise has just started accepting fares in san francisco at night — the public are actually using this — and it will be launching in austin and phoenix by the end of the year. as for ourjourney, well, we visited all the sites we wanted to see, albeit through some strange routeing, and made it back safe and sound. it was amazing, surreal, scary all in one. bye. that was a really bizarre experience. an unnerving experience. 0k. so... oh, whoa!

not a scratch on us, but definitely did some things during that ride that made me feel uncomfortable. ooh, ooh! what's happened there? it definitely needs a bit more work. that was james. and james is virtually here with me now. i'm glad you're ok. it was quite unnerving watching that. it was definitely strange and i really did think... everyone told us before we were going to get into this thing that it would be kind of unnerving for 30 seconds or a minute and then you would get over it. it just never happened. i was nervous for the whole thing. itjust made these jerky movements very often. and although they said that the decisions the car was making were safe, they didn't feel safe and they weren't the decisions that a human would make. it feels weird to think they're alive. it's a bit like toy story. yeah, right. and that's the dream of this technology — that, you know, your car, you use your car

in the day and when you go to sleep at night, you might be able to use it as a taxi. and this is the very start of what feels like a really important moment in the way in which we get around cities and we get around generally. whilst you've been journeying around, i know you've also taken a trip to the first apple in—the—flesh event that's happened in a few years. how was it? it was very interesting. yeah, we haven't done it for three years. the pandemic has stopped that. yeah, it was kind of fascinating. it's interesting seeing proper apple bros. people who are obsessed with apple phones. i mean, the guy in front of us seemed extremely excited. he was very happy, even though, look, these are really incremental changes. and there were some interesting things that happened, but with the iphone 14 to the iphone 13, how much is different? i think a lot of people think there's not much difference. and that's something we're

going to find out more about. thank you so much, james. and here's zoe kleinman, who got her hands on the latest iphone. this is the iphone 14 pro. from the back, comes in pretty colours, but ultimately, it looks like an iphone. i've been carrying it around with me for a few days now. nobody�*s batted an eyelid. it's chunky. it's got this aluminium ring here that's supposed to protect it from inevitably getting smashed. but that's not what everybody�*s talking about. the first thing is this always—on display. it's a bit weird when you first get the phone because you feel like you've forgotten to lock it or something. it's not a new idea, but it's certainly new to apple. and apple says that it uses hardly any battery life. the battery, by the way, is not bad. they say that it'll last you all day and i certainly have not been charging this more than once a day. the thing that everyone's really talking about with this device is what they're calling

the dynamic island. basically, on former iphones, you had a sort of black oblong. apple has sort of turned it into a little screen to show you notifications. now, what we haven't talked about yet is the other features that are unique to this new phone. but to do that, we're going to go outside, so come with me. let me tell you a bit about the camera. there's a 48—megapixel camera on the back of the iphone 14, which apple says gives you a much greater depth of zoom when you're taking pictures of really tiny things. it's also four times more powerful than the camera on the back of apple's previous models. you've still got your selfie camera on the front, where the dynamic island is — that's 12 megapixels — and it comes with autofocus, which apple says will give you a better picture of those all—important group selfies. it performs well in low light, as well. here's a dark staircase. and this is what it

shot when i sat there. the phone also boasts action mode — increased video stability — and some new emergency features. engine ignites one of the features of the new phone that i'm not going to be able to show you, i hope, is crash detection. so the iphone 14 uses a number of different sensors, including the gyroscope, the microphone will pick up the sound of an engine cutting out — an engine — that's right, it won't work for cyclists, not yet, anyway — to identify if you are in a severe crash. and if you are, it will notify the emergency services. apple does seem to think that people that use its phones are often in a situation of mild peril because another feature of this phone is emergency satellite connectivity. i can't show you that either because it's only going to be available at first in north america. but basically, if your phone can't find a signal, you'll be able to point it up at the sky and find a passing satellite and send an 505 message that way. it's the sort of feature

that is reassuring to have. how many iphone 14 users are actually ever going to need it? hmm, i'm not convinced. ok, time for a look at this week's tech news now, and the ceo of apple, tim cook, has told the bbc there's no good excuse for the lack of women in the tech sector. he said more needs to be done to educate young people in the skills that they need for the industry, such as coding. nasa says it could be a couple of months before it knows if an experiment to change the course of an asteroid has worked. it crashed the dart probe into the rock deliberately to see if the same technique would work to stop future objects from hitting earth. over the next two months we're going to see more information from the investigation team on what period change did we actually make, because that's our number—two goal. number one was hit the asteroid, which we have done, but now number two is really measure that period change and characterise how much ejector we actually put out.

london's natural history museum is going to digitise their environmental research onto the cloud for the first time. they say the new data platform will give hundreds of scientists access to their resources, allowing them to track and respond to the biodiversity crisis. and this camera could unlock a whole new underwater world. how? well, it doesn't need a battery. it's wireless, allowing it to go deeper and for longer than cameras have gone before, and engineers at mit have designed it to convert sound travelling through water into power. music plays ooh! spencer sniffs. there was another... there was another whiff of something there.

i don't know. grapefruits? is it the sea? today, i'm having a rather smelly experience while trying to solve a mystery from history. this is one of the most famous shipwrecks in the world. the mary rose was king henry viii's favourite warship. and in isas, while battling the french, it sunk under mysterious circumstances. for more than 400 years, it lay on its side at the bottom of the river solent. but amazingly, the starboard half was preserved under the silt, which led in 1982 to one of the most complex maritime salvage operations in history. and now, exactly a0 years on, i've donned a bluetooth—connected backpack

that will release different smells as i chase around the mary rose museum in portsmouth trying to work out why the ship went down. right in the bowels of the ship now, and i'm smelling tar. it's like the roadworks outside my house. we've got a genuine mystery here. we don't know why the mary rose sunk on the 19th ofjuly,1545. and now we're giving you the chance, through following these clues, to work it out for yourself. my dad was a sailor— for the spanish merchant navy. he's from the sahara desert in north africa originally. i myjob is to meet the characters and watch the scenes that might explain the sinking. i think i'm going to fire the cannon now, i'm getting a smell. a bit of gunpowder there.

spencer laughs. the backpack is loaded with different scent bottles, each triggered by the scenes in the augmented reality app. the idea being to make this whole experience even more immersive. in terms of where we process smell in the brain and where we process memory in the brain, they're very closely connected, they're linked, they're in close proximity. so, actually, that's why smell and memory work together. so you smell a smell and it'll take you back maybe to your childhood. you know, you might smell cabbage cooking and it will remind you of school dinners in the canteen. it's kind of very subtle. it's not in your face because it's literally not in yourface. it's just around you. so there's just that kind of ambience of, in this case, a recently fired cannon. yes!

looks like you owe me three groats. - 0h! stale beer! is that you or me? the smells themselves have been created specially by a perfume company whose task was, let's say, not to be sniffed at. sometimes they send the scent and you smell it and you're like, "yeah, i didn't want a soil—inspired perfume. i actually want soil," you know? "so could you just go again on that?" and they tried to make us some rotten meat, for in the hold — the cook's clue, if you got to that clue — and itjust smelt nothing like rotten meat. it smelt like a really nice, you know, austin, texas barbecue. and i was like, "guys, it's not going to fly." so then we changed that one because they also stored the beer and the meat together. so we were like, "0k, we're not going to get rotten meat. some things are really hard to recreate. we'll go with the beer." so, yeah. the ship is heaving dangerously. - she doesn't feel stable.

oh, she's doing a sharp left turn! i think she's going to lose it on the bend. yep. she's going down. screaming. at the end of the experience, the mary rose is doomed to sink once more — for reasons that we'll never know for sure. but this time, having met an incompetent captain, a vengeful shipmate, and heard about the many mistakes that were made on board, visitors get to give their thoughts on why the ship went down. sounded like some unpleasant smells were being brewed up there. so how about an idea for some nicer ones? yes! so a perfume company had a go at making those unusual smells for the mary rose museum. but of course, their main game is meticulously mixing the perfect smell. and we're all individuals, so maybe we deserve our own scent. and anna holligan�*s been to the netherlands to find out what it takes to make a personalised perfume. anna: artificial intelligence — it trawls through data faster than humans can,

and it learns, making suggestions our brains might not have considered. so ai has the potential to make any industry smarter. but here in the netherlands, it's being used to sniff out something i'm especially keen to explore. more than ten million data points are being used to try to create any person's unique, personalised perfume. first up, some questions in the centronics app. "if you could be somewhere else right now, where would that be?" hmm. ooh, by the ocean. some directly related to perfume, but others not so much. we cast a pretty wide net of questions because, in the long run, we're also a bit of a science adventure and project to really understand, you know, why is it that we like what we like? the ai generates three scent recipes using algorithms that scan the data in different ways. i name mine after my daughter, zena, kitty, our producer, and click — obviously.

with some automated magic, ingredients are pumped out on demand. it is a complicated craft. and so technology is sort of giving you a little push to get started. my mini perfumes are made in minutes. i was pretty impressed with the essence of zena. mmm! oh, i really like it! and my second scent was a pleasant surprise. here's kitty. ooh, my gosh! that's so different! very rich and deep and woody. and now i'm going to hand you over click. so this is the first—ever bbc click perfume. this is not nice. record needle scratch. it's sophisticated, like the click team. but i wouldn't buy this.

two out of three isn't bad, though. the app asks for feedback to improve, and 40,000 people have already used the machine. will the ai learn over time, get smarter and be more likely to give three bottles that i love? all three. that is the ambition, to ultimately one day not even have to give you three. of course, i thought i could outsmart the ai by tweaking the formula of my favourite scent. you know... you prefer the other one? i prefer the other one! i would've thought that by adding what i thought my preferences were, it would enhance the scent. but, actually, i prefer the original.

so for now i think, when it comes to perfume, i am prepared to put my preferences in the hands of ai. away from the shop floor, i wonder, could this system really dent the $40 billion perfume industry? hi, how are you? this is where we really build the machine. so this is basically giving you the possibility really to dive in deep. and it has over 210—220 ingredients. you know, the urban legend is 700 people are deciding for seven billion people how the world smells. so, by developing their own system that cuts costs and sits away from the beauty aisle, the team are opening up to new audiences and genders. this is our next thing that we're going to do. if people do it online, then they can follow it with cameras on a machine. but the machine has some way to go to understand the eclectic global demand. when it's really geographically far apart, then the system has to retrain.

it develops new preferences in certain areas. and so that's one of the reasons, actually, really, why we're travelling around — to get more input from different people, totally different cultures. this intelligence may be artificial, but it does appear to have real power to recognise and interpret the essence of you. lara: anna, there, smelling lovely, probably. yes, probably. do you know what? i think i can imagine exactly what that click fragrance smelled like. stale crisps and online gaming. and on that note... get it? ..that�*s all we've got time for. thanks for watching. we'll see you soon. get a load of that. bye! hello. wednesday gets off to a windy start, a wet start in northern and western areas. got an area of low pressure

which is spinning up across the uk and will quickly move on towards scandinavia, there'll be a trailing weather front from it though taking rain southwards which will begin wednesday dry and following on behind, it'll be sunshine and blustery showers. this is how things look at 6:00 in the morning. bit of a wet night in northern ireland and across much in scotland, heavier rain for wales and north—west england. look how mild it is, though, through wales and england in particular as the day begins. quite quickly the rain out of northern ireland, it'll be out of much of scotland by end of morning, brighter skies following on behind with scattered showers, some heavy and maybe thundery, moving quickly on gusty winds. wales and northern and western england dryer into the afternoon, sunny spells, chance of a shower, and through the afternoon, spell a brief spell of rain through east anglia and the south—east of what is a dry start of the day here, maybe a few sunny spells. it is a windy day, these are some wind gusts, stronger through irish sea coasts, particularly north wales and north—west

england windy to begin the day and temperatures actually come down a bit once the rain has moved on through so it will feel cooler and particularly fresher into the afternoon. of course, that's helped by that gusty wind. we continue with some showers moving in overnight, wednesday into thursday, particularly towards the north—west of the uk and mayjust merge to give a stronger spell of rain for the uk. it will become mainly dry further south you are through and england, lower temperatures, so a cooler start to the day on thursday. high pressure to the south keeping many southern areas essentially dry on thursday. whereas another set of weather fronts are coming close to northern ireland and scotland so here, there'll be a few showers around to begin the day but the idea will be it'll tend to cloud over and we will see some outbreaks of rain coming into northern ireland and parts could be though, mainly dry and a quite bit of sunshine around here. more heavy rain and parts of northern ireland and scotland, overnight and into friday, then pushing through wales and england on friday, very slowly, mind you. behind it, the further north you are, back into the sunnier skies,

brisk winds still, some showers around, some of them could be heavy, maybe with a rumble of thunder. an area of high pressure nosing in across the uk to give many places a dry start the weekend before we see further outbreaks of rain, mainly to the north and west as we go on through sunday.

welcome to bbc news. i'm david eades. our top stories: ukrainian forces are continuing to retake more territory abandoned by russian troops. we have an extended report on the high price being paid. russian army uniforms and boots, all of this cast aside by russian troops. what happened here wasn'tjust a defeat for president putin. it was a complete humiliation. hundreds of thousands of people in somalia are facing extreme hunger after the worst drought in 40 years. 300,000 people are living in famine conditions with another 2 million on the brink of famine. so it is hard to imagine a situation more desperate, more urgent, more compelling.