this is bbc news — the headlines... tokyo and seoul say north korea has fired three missiles amid heightening tension in the region. they said one of them was long—range. that prompted the japanese government to issue a rare emergency alert to residents to stay indoors. japan and south korea have both condemned pyongyang's actions. after ten days of peace talks, a surprise deal has been reached between the government of ethiopia and rebel forces in tigray for a permanent cessation of hostilities. the two—year conflict has left hundreds of thousands dead, almost five million displaced, and a population on the brink of starvation. president biden has said americans must unite in opposition to "political violence" — saying democracy itself will be on the ballot paper in next week's mid—term elections.

mr biden accused the former president donald trump, and his supporters, of undermining democracy and fuelling anger and violence. now on bbc news, click. this week we're guarding against danger and disaster. shiona is in sweden to put the first average female crash test dummies through their paces. whoa! 0k. i'm ready to be rescued right now. that looks chilly. it certainly does. but how could drones help

rescue swimmers in distress? lj takes the plunge to find out. and then, from cold and wet to hot and dry, laura checks out the ai watching for wildfires. the alerts come through. i didn't even notice - that but the camera did. as cars get ever more powerful and ever more numerous, the quest for road safety is an ongoing battle. some cities, like london, have introduced congestion zones, which reduce the amount of traffic and make things safer for pedestrians. but there's also research, of course, going into how to protect the passengers inside the vehicles too. car safety testing is still largely done on the same crash test dummies that were used in the 1980s, and they were based on the male form. but now a team of engineers in sweden are in the final stages of developing the first average female crash test dummy. so what happens to a woman's body during a crash?

shiona mccallum has been to linkoping in sweden to find out. when you think of car crashes, you probably think of something like this. but rear impacts being hit from behind are also happening every day on our roads. it might look gentler, but these kinds of collisions can leave people with debilitating injuries like whiplash. crash test dummies are used to test how well car safety features protect people against injury, but not everyone is equally protected. women are three times more likely to suffer whiplash than men if they're in a car that's hit from behind. and although whiplash isn't usually fatal, it can cause serious and permanent disabilities. we stopped at a zebra crossing. sarah's car was hit from behind last month. there was a big bang. a little car had been shunted into the back of me by a transit van.

it was a really big shock at the time. and my daughter was absolutely crying her eyes out. her neck was hurting. and she said her back as well. got stiff neck and shoulders. i'm having to take medication for that. and both of us are due to see a physio shortly. the anxiety of, are you going to be able to do yourjob because of your aches and pains? yeah, it's amazing howjust a bump from behind can, you know, can impact your life. some scientists say more representative crash test dummies are an important step in improving car safety. engineers here in sweden have been busy working on the first crash test dummy that represents the average woman.

dr astrid linder is leading the research. in order to ensure that you identify the seats that have the best protection for both parts of the population you definitely need to have the part of the population at highest risk represented. currently, the industry predominantly uses average male dummies in car safety tests, although there are a number of dummies with different weights, ages and sizes. the crucial point, though, the average female is not represented. you can assess how it interacts with the seats during the crash and also how well it protects the occupants. and what is unique about this occupant here is that she is a model of an average female. dr linder�*s dummies are designed specifically to test how well cars protect people from injuries

in low—impact rear collisions. she's162cm tall and weighs 62kg. what you can see here is of course the soft part of our body. females are somewhat shorter and lighter than males on average. and then we also have differences in muscle strength, which plays a role in terms of how you respond to a crash. but then in addition, of course, when it comes to the interaction with the seat, we have differences in the shape of the torso and the centre of gravity of our torso and the outline of our hips and pelvis. the engineers are performing tests on the dummy to see what happens to her in a simulated rear crash.

so we've just seen the crash test. what are we now seeing on the screen? you see the relative motion of the torso and the head and the head interacting a bit with the head restraint. and you see that this is a very low severity. it's seven kilometres per hour. that will probably not be a scratch on your car if you're hit in this severity and no damages and so on. but you see the amount of motion that goes on in our body when we are impacted in this severity. and you see that range, don't you, just from the way the chin moves right back, you only really see that in slow motion. absolutely. it's over in 100 milliseconds.

so why has it taken so long for a dummy representing the average woman to be created? i think it has to do with this resistance that we live in, that it's too expensive, it costs too much. and it's very easy for powerful groups to push back on government entities to say, you know, we can't afford something else. us company humanetics are also innovating to create more realistic dummies, but theirfemale dummy is roughly the size of an average 12—year—old girl. that's the size required in most tests by industry regulators, along with a dummy. regulators, along with a dummy that's the size of the average man. at the end of the day, we don't know who's going to get in the car. it's going to be our mother. it's going to be our grandmother. it's going to be our daughter. and we want them all to be equally safe, as well as our sons, our husbands and our fathers. and so we need to make sure that that interior cabin is not biased in any gender equality.

we want to make sure it's equal for all bodies. we contacted leading car manufacturers, including ford, mercedes, toyota, nissan and audi. they acknowledged the work being done in sweden, but they aren't currently required to use an average female dummy by industry regulators. the plans for dr linder�*s dummies will be made openly available next month. it's taken decades to get here, but a crash test dummy representing the average female is close to becoming a reality, bringing with it hopes that women will one day be safer behind the wheel. that was shiona. and to talk more about the issue of male centric design, i met the author of invisible women, caroline criado perez. caroline, you've talked a lot about how the issue of inequality exists in everything from medical trials all the way through to gadget design. how big a problem is this? it's huge problem. it's a huge problem.

you know, it's a structural problem that exists in every part of the world. this idea that if we just collect data on men, that will sort of suffice, you know, that men are somehow this kind of default, gender neutral setting for humanity. and if we design things for them, that's like designing things for humans. and we're sort of forgetting about the fact that half the population are not men. it seems a big thing to forget. why has this happened? if you look at renaissance medical illustrations, the anatomical illustrations, the male body was presented as the default body. and it's reallyjust sort of carried on through history that we present men as if they're gender neutral. and i think the real problem really is that we don't acknowledge that we're doing that and so then we don't really think that we're excluding women. if you went up to people and asked them, do you think we test cars on male and female car crash test dummies, they would say, well, i've never really thought about it, but, yeah, i assume we do. of course we would. most people don't know

this is going on. when it comes to something like a smartphone, you'd think that it would be simple to just have different sizes. some that would be smaller for people with smaller hands, some that were bigger for people with bigger hands who are probably going to be men. you were happy with where apple were going with this at one point, but then it all went a bit wrong as far as you're concerned. yeah, i mean, you might well think it would be easy to just have different sizes of things. what a radical idea. and that was, in fact, what apple did briefly. so they originally had this iphone se, which was a smaller phone, but it was a less advanced phone. and then in the last couple of years, they decided to do away with that and to introduce the mini, which was as good as the big phones, butjust smaller, which was fantastic, and they've decided to discontinue it. do women actually want smaller devices, though? i think it's a really interesting cultural question, actually. i'm not going to make claims that all women want one thing, and obviously some women are going to want a bigger phone, some men want a smaller phone.

but what i'm talking about is averages here and it's very difficult to separate what people want from social norms and social hierarchies. and so what you often find is that because historically the so—called female version of things has been seen as the worst thing, a lot of women don't want to go for what is seen as the female version of something. electric cars were around right from the beginning, pretty much, but petrol cars won out because they were seen as the more manly thing and electric cars were presented as something for ladies. when it comes to something like the size of a smartphone, i'm a woman, i like having a big smartphone. i'm not bothered about the size of a vr headset, but of course there are far more serious issues here at play. what i'm talking about here is a systemic issue.

when you're talking about a systemic issue, that means there are going to be things that are just annoying. it's not going to kill me that the shelf is set too high for me in a supermarket, right? what might kill me is that there isn't a. . .that artificial hearts, for example, that most of them are designed around a male body, so they don't actually fit inside the female body. this isn'tjust some isolated examples. it's in everything. the map on your smartphone giving you the quickest route rather than the safest route, which a woman might want. and i would argue that's probably not being presented as an obvious option, because mostly men are not as worried as women are about how they get home at night in the dark, all the way through to the doctor missing your heart attack because it hasn't presented in a classic male way. you've been looking at all of this for some years now. do you think there's been progress? it's an uphill battle. this is a huge change that we're talking about. so it's going to take a really long time.

that was lara talking to caroline criado perez. now time for a look at this week's tech news, and tech giants have reported slower revenue growth this quarter. google owner alphabet said sales rose by 6% in the three months to september, but this is the us firm's weakest quarterly growth in nearly a decade outside of the start of the pandemic. a robot fish that can gobble up microplastics from water has been brought to life by the university of surrey. gilbert is a prototype of this year's winning entry to the uk's natural robotics contest, and it has gills that can filter out plastics in the water as it swims. and freely available to download for anyone with a 3d printer. we have got robots out on lakes patrolling the water for microplastics and bringing them back to the lab. and it's going to support an ongoing programme of making the water cleaner. into the metaverse now, where interpol is looking to catch the next generation of criminals. the global policing organisation has announced it'll be training officers in its own virtual world.

it hopes that by experiencing the metaverse first—hand it'll be better equipped to police it. and finally, scientists at the national university of singapore say they've created the world's first interactive mouthguard. the smart mouth guard lets individuals with limited hand function control smartphones, computers and wheelchairs by translating bite patterns into instructions. the open water, the last place you want to get into difficulties. last year, lifeguards from the royal national lifeboat institution rescued more than 3,000 swimmers in distress off the coast of the united kingdom. however, tragically, there were still over 100 accidental fatalities in coastal waters in 2021. but what if there was a way to get to swimmers in trouble even faster without lifeguards even having to set foot in the sea? well, here in southern

wales, a new solution is being trialled. one good thing obviously from this is because we've had comms with cardiff. it's just happened. they will then put their own notice out to let other aviators know that there is going to be some sort of aircraft system flown from this beach. now, it sounds like they're talking about a drone here, but it's notjust any drone. it's an ip 67 waterproof rated drone. so it can fly, but it can also float on water. the camera's waterproof. everything about it is waterproof. it can fly in the rain. it can fly in much higher wind speeds than a typical drone. and, yeah, you can sit it on the water, float and take off again. but that's not all. this drone has a hidden feature that's crucial in its mission to save lives, an ability to not only carry, but to release. you've got the payload release mechanism. you can hook up a buoyancy aid to it and remotely

release it out at sea. put that over your head. so put your arms through. and that's exactly what we've come to see in action today in a simulated rescue with me as the willing guinea pig. we're in. 0k. this is cold. it's really cold and i've got to get into that. now, there are, of course, situations where you wouldn't need the drone — for example, if i was close to the shore. in that case, lifeguards could just dive straight in and rescue me. but here, hundreds of metres from shore, and when every second counts, the drone can beat even the fastest of swimmers in a race. 0k. i'm ready to be rescued right now.

the rescue drone can carry multiple types of buoyancy aids, ranging from a tube buoy like you see here, to one that instantly inflates upon hitting the water. we simulated the rescue because you need special permission to drop things out of the sky. and this expands with a carbon dioxide canister, much like you see in those fizzy drinks machines, this flotation device, so that it means i can hold on to this until i'm rescued.

now safely back on dry—ish land, i wanted to find out more about the drive behind this project and whether this would lead to lifeguards being replaced by drones. technology is new to our industry, and i think if people embrace it to support the lifeguards and life—savers, it could be phenomenal. it's not there to replace people. that's really important. we need lifeguards. we need humans to do rescues, to resuscitate, to give cpr, first aid, all that kind of stuff when it goes horribly wrong. i think this will enhance traditional lifeguarding. so i think we'll still absolutely need the lifeguards, but this technology will allow them to maybe do theirjob better because they have more visibility and they can get to places quicker. this life—saving system will be trialled early next year. at £900, the training doesn't come cheap, but apparently it will be funded by the beach owner or manager. there's probably quite a few different use cases. the drone obviously is absolutely great for dropping the equipment like you saw today, but it also has other opportunities, so it could be

used to spot rip currents. and it's notjust how the drones can be used, but the additional add—ons that can be plugged into them in the future. these range from high resolution cameras for photography, thermal cameras, loudspeakers, and even sonar. while this will be the first system of its kind in the uk, a similar system has been in place in the spanish city of valencia since 2016. and as you can see here, it's clearly proving it can save lives. that was l] in the water. rather her than me. 0k, well, we're going from the very, very wet to the very, very dry. the complete opposite. we have all watched in horror at the devastation caused by wildfires across the globe. lives and homes destroyed, wildlife displaced all whilst firefighters are risking their own lives to try and stop the flames. now, climate scientists are warning that as heatwaves get more intense and more frequent, the risk of wildfires will increase, too.

of course, the question is, can technology help to get wildfires under control earlier? laura goodwin investigates. it only takes one spark to start a wildfire that can spread for miles and rage for days. with our climate changing and land becoming drier, it's providing the perfect conditions for wildfires to blaze. and even in traditionally cooler parts of the world, wildfires are becoming more unpredictable. mist and cloud are dominating the skyline today. but back in the summer, it was very different. it had been particularly dry and this piece of moorland in west calder, just outside of edinburgh, burned for three days. it took 60 firefighters and 12 appliances to eventually bring it under control.

dr tom smith is a wildfire expert. i believe you're at the site of a summer grassland fire in scotland, which is very unusual. fires normally occur in the spring when the heather fuels have dried out and become available to burn before they green up and contain lots of moisture. that usually stops the fires from happening in the summer in scotland. but what you've seen is that the grasses have got so dry that they were available to burn in august. we're seeing these longer, hotter, drierspells, and that's predicted to continue through the rest of this century until we do something about carbon emissions and reduce the level of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere. how important is acting early, early detection and trying to get on top of things as quickly as possible? first of all, there's prevention, and that's identifying parts of the landscape that are most at risk from fires. we model fires on a landscape using computers. we drop ignitions onto simulations and look at where the fire might spread. so that's one key kind

of tool in our tool box. another one is being prepared. so apart from prevention, we can prepare. but could technology help to catch wildfires before they take hold? we've come to the bayes centre at edinburgh university to find out, and to do that we need to go up. andre cheung is ceo of robotic cats. they've developed ai detection systems trained to spot the early signs of wildfires. in most parts of the world, firefighters have a really challenging job. they don't have enough resources to hire enough first responder firefighter to put out all fires. if they can find a fire earlier, use less resources to control them. that's a critical point. using cameras in itself isn't new, but currently many systems rely on manual judgment. what robotic cats have done is to teach the al to recognise the signs of fire far earlier.

so obviously we don't have a fire that we can look for here in edinburgh, but we've set up a screen looking at...where is this, andre? this is a controlled burns in hong kong in remote areas. we're going to see if this camera can detect it? yes. my phone is taking images of the video and sent it to ai. and then ai will run analytic to the images to see if it's fire, any fire—like signal. and hopefully we'll get the alert on your phone. that's the images, real—time detection. we see the image and then the highlight of the fire is here. yes. so the alert�*s come through. i didn't even notice that. but the camera did. the ai did. we trained the ai using a lot of early stage wildfire. and then the ai, we run analytics on images to see if there's any fire—like signal. the inherent risk of wildfires means this is a space

in which the tech has had to grow. across the world, different techniques are being employed from giant sprinklers in spain to infrared cameras in america. ai will have its place, but ultimately the aim is the same, to detect wildfires as quickly as possible and to protect the lives they threaten. that was laura, and that's all we've got time for. yeah, thanks for watching, see you soon. bye— bye. hello. there was a stormy end to wednesday — low pressure sweeping rain and gales across the uk. as we move into thursday, though, we'll see some improvements, with some sunshine around. one or two showers, but it will stay quite wet in the south—east

as the overnight rain band lingers. and you can see here on the pressure chart, eventually it'll wriggle away as we move into thursday afternoon, but this new area of low pressure will bring increasing showers to the south—west quadrant of the country, along with strengthening winds. you notice the blue hue there on the temperature map. it will feel cooler across the northern half of the country throughout the day today. so a wet, damp morning across the south—east. eventually that should clear away into the afternoon. elsewhere, plenty of sunshine around. one or two showers. most of the showers affecting wales and the south—west of england, with increasing winds here, particularly through the channel. but it will be a blustery day across the southern half of the country. winds slightly lighter further north — that is away from the far north of scotland, and temperatures ten, 11 degrees in the north, at around 12 or 13 in the south, so it will feel cooler for all. it looks like that area of low pressure will bring showers or longer spells of rain through thursday night for wales, south—west england, perhaps the south coast as well, and certainly through the channel

for the channel islands, winds will be strong for a while. but a ridge of high pressure starts to build in early on friday, so winds veering to a more northerly direction and it will be quite cold. temperatures down to freezing across some northern areas and a bit of mist and fog too. so here it is — ridge of high pressure building in across the country for friday before more low pressure arrives for the weekend. any early showers will clear away from the far south early through friday, and then it's bright, plenty of sunshine around. a chilly start, mind you. temperatures rising a little bit through the day. a few showers still across northern scotland, but most places dry. 11 to 13 or 1a degrees across the south. so the weekend is looking unsettled. we've got more low pressure working its way in off the atlantic. that's going to bring rain and gales at times. it looks like one frontal system will cross the country on saturday, though. it will tend to weaken as it pushes towards the eastern side of the country, then it's blustery showers, strong winds into sunday and this front bringing some wet weather once again

to the south—east corner, so quite a mixed bag through the weekend. like i mentioned, it's wet in the west, showers further east, and then a little bit drier in the north on sunday. very wet across the south—east.

this is bbc news. our top stories... there's less than a week to go until the us midterm elections — president biden says democracy itself is on the line. we must have one overwhelming unified voice, speak as a country, and say there is no place, no place, for voter intimidation and political violence in america. the japanese government issues a rare emergency alert after north korea launches ballistic missiles towards its territory. a surprise peace deal after nearly two years of civil war in ethiopia. it's hoped vital aid can now flow into northern tigray —