that's as flat—packed as its furniture. with the curve folding, we dance with the metal. joe's investigating the future of passwords and passcodes, and they're looking a little different. it's probably not enough to fool you, but can it fool a machine? ai in agriculture — how technology is helping farmers in india to make smarter decisions about their crops. and the robot that sinks seaweed. in the future, we'll be able to gather like, information about wind speeds, temperatures on the surface and map everything. scooters. they're lean, nifty, greener than cars — really green if they're electric.

but there's one thing about them that could still be greener — the way they're made and what they're made from. this is stilride one. it has one very unusual feature. its chassis is made from one piece of steel. all the curves, all the lines have been folded like origami, following a design by its creator tue beijer. with the curve folding, we dance with the metal.

the reason is notjust about aesthetics. see, a typical scooter is assembled in special factories from more than 100 parts, and then it's shipped around the world. but for this bike, all that would need to be sent anywhere is the design. because a bike, if you would send a bike in a crate, you're shipping air. you don't want to ship air. whether you're in sweden, you're in england, you'll probably find sheet metal, right? so it's better to send the code rather than to send yourfinal product. that's a very, very efficient way to do it, you know? so you want to produce near the end customer. i've been given permission to fire the laser. the plan is for locally—sourced steel to be laser—cut into a flat chassis pattern and then for robots to bend it into the right shape like these

ones are currently doing for other simpler objects. all in all, there are 15 components, including a saddle that also starts life flat. and once it's all been folded up, it comes here to be welded. and it looks like this. while the design is still being perfected, the prototypes are bent manually. the curved folds in particular are hard to get your head around. stilride has developed its own software to calculate how to get the shapes that they need with help from a hand—cranked folding machine — back at the office, that is. but i know what you're thinking. without all those bolts and screws and separate supports, can a folded piece of metal be strong enough to ride around on? if you put a straight fold into a material, it doesn't become that strong because even if you lock one side of the fold, it can carry

on bending, like that. but if you put a curved fold into a material, then as you change the shape on one side of the fold, it forces the other side into a particular shape, too. and that means, if you lock this side into position, the whole structure becomes rigid. the best example i've seen of that is your french fries container, which is pretty flimsy when you're only using the straight folds on the edge, but there are two curved folds on the bottom, and if you engage those, the whole thing locks into place and your chips don't fall out. the bike that we created now, or the chassis that we've done for the stilride one, compared to a competitor bike, it's a tubular frame, a typical scooter. we created a chassis that's even 50 times stronger or more stiff, rigid than the tubular frame. stilride has bigger ambitions

than just two wheels of steel. parts of larger vehicles could also be made this way, along with the footings for wind turbines that would imitate tree roots and... really, even whole bridges? well, maybe in sections. one step at a time, though. the scooter goes into production later this year and it'll cost 15,000 euros. that was bringing back memories of trying to build flat—pack furniture. yeah, but here you a nice, personal... one day — a robot to bend it into shape for you. true. now, if i was to ask you your mother's maiden name, the place that you were born, and the name of your first pet. would you tell me? no! correct. because? because then you'd have enough to reset my password. and we've all been there — created those wonderful, unique passwords, but then realised we've got so many websites to use them on that you don't know which password

goes with which website. yeah, exactly. but we might soon all be able to leave passwords behind because the tech giants are working on a new passwordless solution called passkeys. now this is where, whenever you log onto a website or a service, your phone vouches for you. for more on passkeys, here comesjoe tidy in a mask and a wig. pass key. passkey. pass key. you may not yet have heard of them, but passkeys are the future of how we stay safe online. dozens of internet businesses, large and small, are hoping this new bit of tech will finally kill off the password. so what are passkeys and why are they a step up from what we've been doing all these years? well, if you think about an online service as a door, you get in by putting in your password or a passcode. but this is obviously insecure as all a fraudster needs is the code or password, and they're in. a passkey acts a little bit like a key card. it checks who i am as well as if i have the right code. but with passkeys, it's

all done on a device and with clever encryption. setting up a passkey takes a few minutes. the online service asks you to verify your identity using your device. it's not hard, but it is more of a hassle than setting up a username and password like we've always done. so why is this huge shift taking place and is it worth it? well, it's because passwords are, and always have been, a terrible way to keep us safe. how bad are passwords as a security measure? awful. i would say that, if a company is restricting things only by password, they're100% vulnerable. we will always get in. cori macy is a hacker for the good guys. she's been breaking into computer networks for companies for years to help them improve defences. people are really bad when they create passwords. nine out of ten times, when i go into an environment and i try the password "summer2023" or "winter2023", you're going to get a few accounts. we find that people frequently

use seeded passwords like nashvillepredatorsiz. that's the first password that they made. and then, across every platform, they'lljust change it a very minuscule amount. passkeys — they're going to help things? yes. make yourjob harder? definitely harder. yeah. the field is always changing. passwords can, of course, be made more secure if you're willing to put the effort in. keeping a password secure these days, is a bit of a process. first of all, of course, you've got to have really complex passwords across every different online service. impossible to remember. so then you need a password manager, then you need to have multi—factor authentication as well. so if you try and log in to a service that you don't normally have on, let's say this device, it's a hassle. it's no surprise that the cybersecurity world has largely failed to get the general public to jump through the hoops needed to make passwords safe. my password manager needs an authentication code. so now, whether we like it or not, the future of logging in online is through our phones with thumbprints, pin codes

and increasingly, facial id. but how safe is your face? well, here in the fraud lab, at online identity expert onfido, they think like criminals to try and trick login services and improve security. it's probably not enough to fool you... but can it fool a machine? well, you can make the 2d version at home very simply, printing it off the right size and then cutting out some holes. it's very unsophisticated. it's low tech. these masks, as you can see, they vary in quality. and the trick there is some of them might look similar to the person that's on the document. but what we found increasingly over the last few years, certainly, is that we've found more and more, what i would call professional fraudsters. they want to ramp it up. they want to be doing several hundred checks or onboarding attempts over the course of an hour. instead of using masks, they've started using deepfakes in the biometrics side of it.

so i am now you. yep. and if you smile, you'll have my smile. yep. that's my smile. yeah. that's the weird thing, because the photo doesn't have my smile on it. because you sent us a single front—on shot, and again, this isn't from the video you sent. oh, this is from just a still picture? yep. and i could have done this from an image on the internet. and now we're both you. so weird. jonathan, come and have a look. you've got to come and be me. yep. there's joe, the cameraman. see, i'm doing twojobs. the speed of innovation in fraud is always worrying, but never more so than in the last year, as deepfake tech has become more sophisticated and readily available. if you look just around the edge of the screen here, can you see there's a...? it's just about to ask, how do you actually spot it? but i can see a little bit of...

distortion. it's picking up this... pattern. here. yeah, right. and if you lookjust around the edge of my face, sojust around here, when i move, sometimes you can see there's a bit of a distortion there as it sort of switches. i can barely see it. right. but this is the thing. you're obviously trained for this and... yeah. and it's becoming harder and harderfor human beings to spot this stuff, which is why we are retraining machine learning models to do it. even with advances in deepfake tech, simon and his team agree that passkeys that use biometrics like facial id are a massive improvement on passwords. no system will ever fully be hacker—proof, but passkeys do mean that the future's brighter for our lives online. i am shiona mccallum, and it's time for a look at this week's tech news. apple has started paying out in the us class action lawsuit over claims it deliberately slowed down certain iphones. claimants could receive around $92 each from the $500 million settlement reached in 2020.

apple said at the time it denied any wrongdoing but was concerned with ongoing legal costs. a new substance has been discovered which could reduce lithium usage in batteries by up to i7%. by up to 70%. the material has since been used to power a light bulb. we think the opportunity for new energy technologies will be absolutely amazing and it is absolutely required as well. so it does fit into our sustainability goals. old green cabinets usually storing broadband and phone cabling will be converted into electrical vehicle charging points on some uk streets, with many of the total cabinets near an end—of—life, bt hopes up to 60,000 of them can be converted to tackle shortfalls in electric car chargers. ces returned with transparent tvs, ai companions and more vr headset among the gadgets on display in las vegas.

tune back into click next week for a look at this year's tech fest. ai is touching every part of our lives, and the food that ends up on our tables is no different. but could the tech really help farmers transform the way that they produce crops? our correspondent in india, archana shukla, has been finding out. indian farmers have traditionally relied upon generational wisdom and experience to make decisions on the field but are now faced with climate change and ever—depleting resources. so the need is for them to have efficient and more sustainable solutions. can artificial intelligence be the answer? this vineyard in southern india is testing it out.

by using devices that are removing guesswork in assessing conditions on the farm and the crop. if we look at the whole system. on the top you have macro climatic sensors, which measures rainfall and wind related events. and then you have solar sensors which measure solar exposure or sunlight exposure to the crop. then you have sensors like leaf wetness and temperature and humidity, which measures moisture on the leaf. all that measurement comes to the brain of the system. ananda verma's start—up fasal agritech uses artificial intelligence to analyse the data collected by these sensors. if you provide this data, in raw form, to the farmer, probably he or she will not understand what to do with it. so this is where ai comes in. what ai does is it looks at that data... ..that is coming from the farm. it looks at what crop the farmer is growing. what is the requirement of the crop in that stage? and it basically uses all these information and then processes it and then produces certain outcome in a very simple

language and manner that farmers can understand. through a mobile app, farmers receive precise guidance on when to water the crops, spray pesticides or tackle pests. nitin patil has been using the service daily on his vineyard to address a problem common to many indian farms. this vineyard where we are now, it has no ground water sources and we are growing these vines with the water that we purchase from outside tankers. so water is very precious for us. with the help of this ai data, we are now able to get to know when the vines really need the water and we can just irrigate them only at the crucial stage. and that's helping us to save around 50% of the water that we used to give before. informed decision—making is only one part of the solution to improve productivity,

but weeding out inefficiencies in the existing age—old agricultural practices is also crucial. this robot is helping farmers save major costs on fertiliser and pesticides. built in india's silicon valley, bangalore, by startup niqo robotics, the machine makes spraying of agrichemicals more efficient. jai, you're doing some precision spraying here. can you just explain to us this technology and this, how the cameras, etc, work? yes. so if you see this specific field here, there's a lot. of distance between two rows| and even between two plants, there's significant distance where there is nothing - to be sprayed. so as the sprayer moves, the camera, real—time, l detects where should the spray be applied specifically - on the plant. and it turns off the nozzles

where there's no plants. i and that saves over 50% of costs on chemicals. niqo sprayers are deployed on 50 farms across the country but are limited to just seven crops so far. that's because the machine needs volumes of data, which are photos of the plant in this case, to learn from and build models for each crop. over the last five years, we - have captured about 8.2 million images across seven ci’ops. and not only that, the number is impressive, but how- varied is the dataset? in our case, we have - seen how the plant looks at seven in the morning versus 1pm and 5pm. i it is very different. they are almost like different plants. - more such technology is reaching indian farms, thanks to improved rural digital connectivity and government support for agritech start—ups. but the promise of profitability through data driven farming needs

significant time and investment to reach the majority of india's farmers. next up, romana kreider has been talking to a startup that's aiming to resolve two issues with one innovation. yeah. now, this is about an invasive seaweed, which turns out to be a problem for both marine life and for people. there have been several incidences in the caribbean of people dying. people, get ready for this smell tomorrow. a seaweed called sargassum has been making headlines. out in the open ocean, it provides a marine habitat, but when it hits our coasts, it becomes problematic. from releasing gases which can be harmful to human health, to impacting local tourism and fishing, these massive, buoyant mats, which stretch

like a carpet across the atlantic, make up the great sargassum belt. being more than 5,000 miles long, it's wider than brazil. and last year, it weighed over 2a million tonnes, making it a continent—sized blob of seaweed. in fact, it is so vast that it's visible from space. and scientists have been studying its explosion using satellite imagery. the exact reasons for the boom are unclear, but it's believed that rising temperatures and agricultural waste are contributing to the excessive growth. and on the other side of the world, there's a company trying to fight it. just like any other plant, seaweed photosynthesises. and because it absorbs carbon faster than trees, there's also a lot of potential. and a team here is using this

to their advantage. they are building a semi—autonomous ocean robot to sink the sargassum and the co2 it captures to the bottom of the sea. doing so, they prevent sargassum from hitting shores whilst fighting global warming. the ipcc has projected, in their most optimistic pathway, which is 1.5 degrees or less, that we will need to remove, from the atmosphere, ten billion tonnes of carbon every single year by 2050, which would be, in terms of volume, the largest industry that has ever existed. if you're looking for a good place to put carbon, the deep ocean is perfect. you have more carbon than there is the upper ocean and the entire terrestrial sphere combined. the algaray is designed to go across the surface of the water and take the sargassum into its cavity, much like it's doing with these ducks here. once it's full, it dives down

to 200 metres, at which point the water pressure crushes the air bladders that keep it afloat and the sargassum sinks down to the seabed. there it's locked away for many hundreds, if not thousands of years. the first version of the algaray was attached to a remote controlled catamaran, whereas the final version is going to be a ten—metre long submersible, powered by green energy. the whole thing is going to be covered in solar panels, so there'll be quite a bit of available energy to drive sensors. so in here, already, we've got depth temperature and a camera on the front, and then in the future we'll be able to gather information about wind speeds, temperatures on the surface

and map everything. using this information, they are creating machine learning training data, which will then enable the algaray to increasingly make its own decisions, such as coordinating with other algarays to gather the mats. but for now, it's time to test the second prototype. cheering. applause. that was relatively quick, but that's not how it's going to be in the end? this is only going down to three metres, so it should actually only take a couple of minutes to go down. in the field, the whole thing would be a ten—minute cycle. the aim is for it to be buried, to go into that long carbon cycle. it's sort of like saying, "we're making the oil of the future." anything that was oil was once marine biomass. so it makes a lot of sense to us to start using that as one of the pathways that

you could use to get to large scale carbon dioxide removals, but also unlock this tremendous opportunity, but also this tremendous need to rebalance our atmosphere. it's a startup in its infancy, and one company alone cannot solve the problem. but facing the threats of global warming, it's another innovation to help win the race against climate change. that was romana, and that's it for this week. but next week, have we got a show for you! yes, we do. it's the biggest tech show of the year — the consumer electronics show, to be precise, in las vegas. ces, she can't wait. i can't wait. hopefully we will see you there. thanks for watching and see you in vegas. bye!

hello there. a few wintry scenes captured by our weather watchers on friday across parts of scotland, such as here in perth and kinross. but the severe frost will become a lot more widespread as we go into the start of next week, with the potential for some disruptive snow, too. where is that colder air? well, it's behind the series of weather fronts. across northern scotland on sunday, that chilly airjust spilling down from the arctic as we head through the start of next week across the whole of the uk, with brisk and cold northerly winds blowing. so, lots of added wind chill to factor into the temperatures. but this is how we start off the day on saturday, with temperatures hovering just above freezing, a few pockets of air frost where we see the clear spells, a week weather front sinking southwards, bringing outbreaks of patchy rain into northern areas of northern ireland, northwest england and north wales. to the north of the front across scotland, some winter sunshine, showers by the end of the day in the north ahead

of the front across england and wales, variable amounts of cloud, but also some brighter spells, temperatures ranging between 5—8 degrees celsius. and it's more of the same, too, on saturday night into sunday morning. there will be some clear skies around at times. we'll start to see the northerly wind pick up, brisk across the northern isles with some snow showers for the north of scotland. but again, to start the day on sunday, most of our temperatures will be slightly above freezing. but then that colder air really starts to show its hand with some snow showers even to low levels across northern scotland, with this feature just running down towards the north, further south as we head throughout the day. but we've still got the milder air with some winter sunshine across england and wales, 7—8 degrees celsius here. but on sunday night into monday, there is the risk of some snow and ice, with weather warnings in place across northern ireland and the north of scotland. that wind starts to really pick up, look at the squeeze on the isobars on monday into tuesday, so wintry showers towards north sea—facing coasts with this feature running across northern ireland

into southern scotland and perhaps northern england. so, here, the snow risk will extend further southwards through the day on tuesday. and then we look to the southwest to see this weather front just moving its way further northwards. there is the possibility that as it bumps into the colder air, we could possibly see some snow across the south of england on wednesday, but it's still very uncertain, so my advice would be to keep an eye on the forecast. it will certainly be cold. there is the greater risk of some snow with some severe frosts by night.

live from washington, this is bbc news. first in the nation: the us state of iowa prepares to choose its republican nominee for president. but as candidates conduct final campaigning in iowa, deadly winter weather could depress turnout. and ron desantis is set to skip new hampshire's primary as he looks to gain steam, support and funding after the iowa caucuses.

hello, i'm sumi somaskanda. thank you forjoining us. the us 2024 presidential race kicks off on monday, when iowa republicans hold caucus meetings to pick the party's nominee. political analysts and the wider public will be particularly focused on who will lead the pack of republican challengers and what the results in iowa may suggest in the run—up to november. but it's notjust in the united states where ballots are being cast. polls are open in taiwan, where voters are choosing a new president and parliament. the economy and education are key issues for voters. but one sobering issue looms large — how taiwan should address the threat from china. it's election day in taiwan and hours ago the candidates how the last rallies before voting on the island's residential election and as we heard they are addressing the threat from china and that's one issue dominating and on the ballot is the current vice president

william lai of the ruling dpp who is vowing