now on bbc news, it's time to click. this week, we are guarding against danger and disaster. shona is in sweden to put the first average female crash test dummies through their paces. 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 alert's 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 we 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? shona 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 may 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 is not 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 and a little car been shunted in the back by a transit van and it was a really big shock at the time and my daughter was crying her eyes out. her neck was hurting and she said her back as well. she had a stiff neck and shoulders and had to take medication for that. both of us are due to see a physio shortly. the anxiety of being able to do yourjob or not because of your aches and pains, yeah, it is amazing howjust a bump, a shunt from behind, 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. doctor astrid is leading the research. in order to ensure that you exemplify the seats that have the best protection for both parts of the population we definitely need to have the part of the population the caries 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, the average female, is not represented. you can assess how it interacts with the seats during the crash and whether it protects the occupant and what is unique about this is that she is the model of an average female. doctor linda's dummies are designed specifically to test how well cars protect people from injuries in low—impact rear injuries. she is 162 centimetres tall and weighs 62kg. you can see here 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 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. siren so we have just seen the crash test and what we now see on screen? the relative motion of the torso and the head and the head interacting with the head restraint. you can see that this is low severity. seven kilometres an hour, there would probably not be a scratch on your car if you were hit with this severity. no damage. but you see the amount of motion that goes on in our body when we are impacted with this severity. and you see that range just from the way that the chin moves right back, you really see that in slow motion. absolutely. and it is over in 100 miliseconds. so why has it taken so long for a dummy representing the average woman to be created? i think it has to do with resistance that we live in that it is too expensive and costs too much and it is very easy for powerful groups to push back on government entities to say we cannot afford something else. us company human ethics are also innovating to create more realistic dummies. their female dummy is roughly the size of an average 12—year—old girl. that is the size required in most test by industry regulators along with a dummy that it's the size of an average man. at the end of the day we do not know who will get in the car. it will be our mother, grandmother, our daughter. and we want them all to be equally safe as well as our sons, husbands and our fathers. and so we need to make sure that that interior cabin is not biased to any gender we want to make sure it is equalfor all bodies. we contacted leading car manufacturers including ford, mercedes, toyota, nissan and audi. they acknowledge the work being done in sweden but are not currently required to use an average female dummy by industry regulators. the plans for these doctor's dummies will be made openly available next month. it has 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 shona. and to talk more about the issue of male—centric design, i met the author of invisible women. caroline, you spoke a lot about how the issue of inequality is in everything from medical trials all the way through to design. how big a problem is this? a huge problem. a structural problem that exists in every part of the world. this idea that if we just cater to men that will sort of suffice, that men are somehow the default gender neutral setting for humanity. if we design things for them it is like designing things for humans and we forget the fact that half the population are not men. it seems a big thing to forget. why has this happened? anatomical illustrations, the male body was presented as the default body and that is just carried on through history, that we present men as if they are gender—neutral and i think the problem is, really, that we do not acknowledge we do that, so we do not think that we are making a mistake. so if you ask people if we test on male and female bodies, most people don't know that this is going on. when it comes to something like a smart phone you think would be simple to have different sizes, some smaller, some bigger. you are happy with where apple were going with this at one point but then it all went a bit wrong as far as you are concerned? 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. they originally had the iphone se which was a smaller phone but it was a less advanced phone. and then in the last few years they decided to do away with that and to introduce the mini, which was as good as the big phones but smaller and that was fantastic and they decided to discontinue that. do women want smaller devices? it is a really interesting cultural question. i will not make claims that all women want one thing and obviously some women will want a bigger phone. some men want a smaller phone. but what i am talking about here are averages and it is 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, many women do not want to go for what is seen as a female version of something. electric cars were around right from the beginning, pretty much, but petrol cars one 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 a smart phone, i like to have a big smart phone and i'm not bothered about the size of a vr headset but there are far more serious issues here. this is a systemic issue and when you talk about a systemic issue it means there will be things that arejust annoying. it will not kill me that the shelf is too high for me in a supermarket, right? what might kill me is that there is not an artificial heart, for example, most of them are designed around a male body, so they do not fit inside a female body. this is notjust some isolated examples. it is in everything. the map on your smartphone giving you the quickest route rather than the safest route which a woman might want and i could argue that is probably not been presented as an obvious option because most 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. we have been looking at all this for some years now. do you think there is progress? it is an uphill battle and a huge change we're talking about. it will take very long time. that was lara talking to caroline. now let's have a look at the tech news this week and tech giants have reported slower revenue growth this quarter. alphabet said that sales rose by six months that makes but it is their weakest quarterly growth in nearly a decade. robot fish didn't gobble up micro plastics from water has been brought to light by the university of surrey. gilbert is a prototype of this year's winning entry in the uk's robotics contest and it has gills that can filter out plastics in the water as it swims and free to download for anyone with a 3d printer. we have robots on lakes, coming to the left, and it's an ongoing programme of making a water cleaner. into the meta—verse now, where interpol is looking to catch the next generation of criminals. the global policing organisation has announced it will be training officers in its own virtual world in hopes that by experiencing the meta—verse first hand, it will be better equipped to police it. and finally scientists at the national university of singapore said they created the world's first interactive mouthguard. the smart mouthguard let's 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 3000 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. 0nly only the one good thing is, with had comms with cardiff, it's just happened, they will put their own notice are two other aviators that there will be some sort of modified aircraft system flown from this position. now it sounds like they're talking about a drone here but it's just any drone. it's an ip 67 waterproof motor drone, so we can fly but it can also float on water. the camera is waterproof, everything about it is waterproof, it can fly in the rain, it can fly much higher wind speeds than the typical drone you can sit on the water, float and take off again. but that's not all. this drone has a hidden feature that is crucial in its mission to save lives, and ability to not only carry butto release. you've got the payload release mechanism, you can hook up a buoyancy aid to that in remotely release it out to sea. put that over your head so it gets your arms through. and that's exactly what will come to see in action today in a simulated rescue with me as the willing guinea pig. there you go. ok, 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 out 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 would see in those fizzy drink machines. this is a flotation device, so it means i can hold onto this until i am rescued. now, safely back on dry 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 people embrace it to support the lifeguards and lifesavers, 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, give cpr, first aid and that kind of stuff when it goes horribly wrong. i think this will enhance traditional lifeguarding. i think we absolutely do need lifeguards with 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 trialed early next year. at £900, the training doesn't come cheap but apparently it will be funded by the beach owner or manager. this probably quite a different use cases. the drone obviously is great for dropping equipment 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. better than me. we're going from the very, very wet to the very, very dry now, the complete opposite. we have watched in horror at the devastation caused by wildfires across the globe. lives and homes destroyed, wildlife displaced, all while firefighters are risking their own lives to try and stop the flames. climate scientists are warning that as heat waves get more intense and more frequent, the risk of wildfires will increase too. 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 but with 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. clouds 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 calderjust outside of edinburgh burned for three days. it took 60 firefighters and 12 appliances to eventually bring it under control. doctor 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. it usually stops the fires from happening in the summer in scotland. but what you've seen is that the grasses got so dry that they were available to burn in august. we are seeing these longer, hotter, drier spells and is predicted to continue through the west of the 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 is prevention and it's identifying parts of the landscape that are most at risk from fires. we model fires on the landscape using computers, we drop ignitions into simulations and we look at where the fire will spread. that is one key kind of tool in our toolbox. 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 chung is ceo of robotic cats. they developed detection systems despite the early signs of wildfires. in most parts of the world, firefighters have real challenging job. they don't have enough resources, first responder firefighters to fight them. if they can find the fire earlier, and use those resources to control it, that is a critical point. using cameras in itself is not new but currently many systems rely on manualjudgement. what robotic cats have done is teach the ai spot the signs of fire fire earlier. obviously we don't have a fire we can look at in edinburgh. but where is this looking at? this is in hong kong. in a remote area. and we will see if this cannot can detect it. taking images of the video and send it to the ai. we use analytics to see if there is any fire—like signal. hopefully you get the alert on your phone. yes, every time we touch this, we see an image and then the highlight of the fire fan is here. yes, so the alert comes through. i didn't notice it but the camera did. the ai did. we train the al to see the signs of fire and then the ai looks at the images to see if there is 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, 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. thanks for watching, see you soon. bye— bye. hello. if the sky is clear sufficiently in northern scotland, there's a pretty good chance of spotting the northern lights. having said that, it has been pretty overcast across many parts of northern britain in the last few hours. let's see where the greatest chance of spotting the aurora borealis is. where you see the red colours, that's the highest probability, but northern scotland is just on the edge, so it could well be on the horizon pretty low and if the sky is clear. low pressure is still dominating our weather. it is still pushing in that mild current of air from the south, rather dragging it in, so sunday is going to be another mild day with a few showers. some of them could be heavy, though, perhaps one or two cracks of thunder, and blustery ones, too. here is the forecast. through the early hours, we will have seen showers drifting into some western parts but clearing skies again in the north and in many eastern areas. the possibility of some showers in the south—east and east anglia as well. and after a mild day, a mild morning on sunday — between ten and 1a, 15 degrees. so here is tomorrow's weather forecast. blustery showers out towards the west pushed in from the south—west, moving northwards, carried on that breeze. they could be heavy across northern parts of the uk. further south, i think predominantly sunny spells and actually, it may stay dry along the south coast all through sunday. and, again, a mild day but not quite as warm, so not the 23 degrees that we recorded on saturday in the south — more like 17 in london. and here is the forecast for the evening. you can see showers continuing there in northern scotland. how about monday? a weather front is approaching. ahead of it, you can see some clearer weather there. so, monday is halloween. we are going to see some sunshine to start with but i think through the course of the morning into the afternoon, this weather front will approach and start to bring some rain from western scotland to northern ireland, perhaps the irish sea, and later nudging into wales and the south—west, but again really mild — the high teens, i think — and it will stay mild, particularly across eastern areas, some clear skies during the course of monday evening. now, let's have a look at the outlook for the next few days. it stays relatively mild until round about wednesday and then from about thursday—friday, we start to see those temperatures returning to the seasonal norm and it will be blustery at times, with frequent showers and spells of rain. i'm rich preston. this is bbc world news