Mean temperature is tracking at 16.13C after four heatwaves, significantly above current record of 15.76C

This summer is set to be the warmest on record for the UK, the Met Office has said, after the country experienced four heatwaves.

The mean temperature for summer is tracking at 16.13C (61.03F), which is significantly above the current record of 15.76C set in 2018.

First conceived as a ‘spider’s web of sticks’, this vast wooden wonder may end up being a template for the environmentally sound buildings of the future

Fringed by a fragmented strip of big box stores, auto repair shops and brick buildings marooned in oceans of asphalt, the state highway of Martin Luther King Jr Boulevard in Fayetteville, Arkansas, is not a place of architectural beauty. And yet, as unlikely as it may seem, this rumbling stretch of road on the edge of this small city is now home to one of the most significant buildings for the future of architecture in North America.

Even at speed, it’s hard to miss. Standing opposite a 200-space Walmart parking lot, the Anthony Timberlands Center for Design and Materials Innovation looks like a group of great big barns caught in a highway pile-up. It begins as a low wooden shed at the back, before suddenly buckling up in jagged folds, its roofline jerking in staccato slopes until it greets the highway with a six-storey shop window. Peer through this glass billboard and you will catch a glimpse of dancing robotic arms, whirring drills, and big wooden building components gliding to and fro on a gantry crane, conjuring the future of low-carbon timber construction.

• British Ineos rider times move to perfection in sprint

• Frenchman Gaudu takes red jersey for first time

Britain’s Ben Turner , of Ineos Grenadiers, outfoxed the Belgian Jasper Philipsen (Alpecin-Deceuninck) in a sprint finish to win stage four of the Vuelta a España on Tuesday, with France’s David Gaudu taking the leader’s red jersey from Jonas Vingegaard.

Philipsen looked well placed coming to the line at the end of the 206.7km ride from Susa in Italy to the French town of Voiron, tucked in behind his compatriot and teammate Edward Planckaert, but Turner timed his move to perfection to win his first Grand Tour stage.

Beats, rhymes and Bannockburn? The creators of Wallace explain why they used hip-hop to tell the story of Scotland’s national hero

If you were to come up with a list of the Scottish playwrights least likely to write a musical about William Wallace, Rob Drummond’s name might be somewhere near the top. Musicals about icons of Scottish history have no more been his thing than plays about bagpipes and Highland cows.

Drummond is the enterprising dramatist and performer who got the audience to help invent a play every night in Mr Write; who asked someone to turn a gun on him in Bullet Catch, and staged a real-time speed-dating event in In Fidelity. He upturned the murky world of light entertainment in Quiz Show, and he trained with the Scottish Wrestling Alliance to perform Wrestling.