this week, alasdair sheds light on the tech behind these dazzling sd displays. something's hand's just come out at me. yeah. it's like a possessed hulk. lara's been checking out the latest health gadgets, including those fending off the calories and those fighting off hair loss. you've got great hair! are you going to tell me you were bald before? and paul heads to the racetrack to see the high—speed cars that don't have human drivers. hey, welcome back to las vegas. this is one of the most famous skylines in the world. and one thing about this sight is it's constantly changing. see, whenever they get fed up with a hotel, theyjust gut it and turn it into something that looks completely different. but in the last year, something really unusual has

lit up the horizon, literally. it's that thing over there. yeah, it's called the sphere, and it is a monster. inside, it's an entertainment venue. outside, it's the world's largest video screen, covered in 1.2 million leds. and it's become an instant landmark and a huge talking point since it opened last year. in a few moments, we'll find out what it's like to live in a city that's dominated by this giant, glowing ball. but first, alasdair keane's been taking a look at how graphics are bringing it to life. our senses are constantly being bombarded by the sights and sounds around us, including advertisements that have been carefully crafted to grab our attention. but in a busy world... ..do we always notice? if everyone is looking at their phone, what we are trying to do here is to convince people to stop looking

at their phones and recall what they have in front of them. bcn visuals are based in barcelona, creating sd displays all around the globe, and now they have a new canvas to work on. and it isn't without its challenges. what we did is think about "round". you know, round things, round shapes, so we can place in there and it would look like we have done something specifically for this. when it came to the storyboards, it was quite challenging. instead of doing the pre—production on this round sphere, we made it look as if it was flat, so it could be easierfor us to think about ideas. and wrapping the content around the sphere wasn't enough. we needed to make it look like...the sphere would open up as if it was a gate, and it would show you everything that it's got in the inside. mechanical clunk the company made its name over the past few years with campaigns in new york's times square

and other major locations around the world. they specialise in a technique which creates the optical illusion of three dimensions, but now that's taken to the next level. i mean, it's huge. people can't miss it. it's huge. you have to get what's on the screen right as well. yes, it's huge. every little detail is a three—metre detail. you know what i mean? like, it's not like, "oh, there was, like, a kind of mistake. "let's hide it with this or let's add a layer." you cannot do that. everything needs to be perfect, and it needs to be seen from all angles, even from a plane. this is a lucrative ad space

which can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a day for companies to take over. to achieve their complicated design process, bcn visuals brought in talented sd animators from hollywood to help bring the characters to life. stephanie katritos has previously worked on movies such as shrek and antz. how much of it is in tricks in the animation and what you can do with technology, and how much is itjust, you know, standing with the lights hitting the screen a certain way? we have a bag of tricks we use. yeah. they laugh it's an illusion. and we are illusionists. like, that's really... that's our magic. that's what we do. we've worked on these screens multiple times. we really understand the screen, and the point of view, and what's going to work the best for that screen. so we try to find those few moments where we can break the fourth wall. we use a lot of different techniques depending on what the brand needs. so we can layer effects over that, also sd characters on top of that. it's about building up a world, and we use everything — effects, lighting, animation, compositing, editing,

all of that — to enhance the image. yeah. you want people on the street to have a sort of wow feeling, or some sort of emotion... yeah. ..through what they see. a surprise, a connection, just an amazement. you know, "wow. how did that happen? "i don't have a pair of sd glasses on." with their displays so big and hard to hide, the team don't get rehearsals. so to help make sure the illusions work, they use virtual reality to experience and test their creation. one of the big problems we have i is when we are about to deliverl the campaign, - we have to test it. the clients want to see it, our team wants to see it, | and, of course, watching it on a flat screen - is not the same. so we decided to replicate the areas we're doing — i

for example, times square — every detail as possible, - so then the clients and our. team can experience exactly what they will see, like a live testing. i yeah. and i can have a show of it as well? yes, of course. go for it. oh, wow. so i'm in times square now. yeah, that's right. and now you should be seeing the avatar campaign. - so, now... yeah, the video's happening. so this happened in is... oh, wow. so they've just jumped out the water. yeah, that's right. and the water's gone everywhere. alan laughs something's hand's just come out at me. yeah. it's like a possessed hulk. ooh! that was cool. when i'm meeting with some advertising agencies, people spend most of the time trying to come up with a good slogan. in our case, i always tell them, "there's not much time to spend on thinking about a good slogan," because first you've got to grab people's attention. the story is even more important than in a two—hour—long movie — selling a shareable moment that

people want to record and want to share with their friends, but also on social media. and that is the secret as to why companies are willing to pay so much for this ad space — not the people who will see it actually in vegas, but on videos shared all around the globe. james: the sphere looks pretty cool inside, but it's the exterior that's really caught people's attention. powered by over a billion leds, it's attracted massive amounts of hype, like this enormous eyeball or the lunar surface. it really is impressive in person. so, what next for the sphere? well, if you'd asked me that a few weeks ago, i would have said london. but there's been a bit of a problem. this car park is the site of what the owners of sphere, madison square garden — or msg — wanted to put the next sphere.

it's in stratford in east london, and it's an area that's seen huge amounts of investment since the olympics was held here in 2012. the problem is, is that stratford definitely isn't las vegas, and it's caused quite a stir here, mainly because the site is really close to where people actually live. so where is it? shall we try and peer over? yeah... it's hard to actually even find a place to look at the location from the ground, as the mayor of newham and i found out. you can peer through here. oh, yeah. you can see the site through there... ..and it's really, really, really constrained. you've got chobham, then you've got a major housing development there, you've got a housing development there, and obviously you've got shoppers there, and then you'll have this big, huge... right. ..globe. it would just be this entire bit of land. ceren sonmez is a resident whose apartment block

would have looked directly over the site. could you imagine you're sat here, i'mjust, like, working from home or i'm just chilling, and there'sjust an eyeball, like, rolling around, looking around? like, it sounds like a nightmare. so any time i don't want to see that, i should close all of... yeah, block every single window to not be seeing that? that's not a good solution. it's particularly problematic because ceren collects plants. having your blinds closed all day isn't exactly ideal for that hobby. what msg say is that, yeah, stratford is different to las vegas, but that's reflected in what they want to do here and that the screens that would be built over there would be turned off late at night and early in the morning. as you may have noticed, i'm talking in the past tense about this application because, earlier this month, msg pulled out of london after the mayor of london rejected

the application because of light pollution. that's great news for ceren and her plants, but is it good for london? msg didn't want to be interviewed for this piece, but it did say that... las vegas�* visitors authority, though, seem more than happy with the sphere and are kind of excited that it's just in las vegas for now. from vegas's perspective, when you look at the skyline, when you look at the strip, it fits in perfectly, it has created a lot of extra excitement. you know, any time you can debut a new offering in the destination, it helps keep vegas top of mind, it gives our visitors a new reason to return. and so, selfishly speaking, it's fantastic that it's here and only here, giving us the opportunity to delight our visitors

when they come here. the sphere almost feels like a homage to light, and it really is impressive. and las vegas feels like the perfect place for it, too. but the problem sphere has is las vegas is so atypical as a city. it's basically a city of light anyway, and it's glamorous and glitzy. people want this kind of thing here. but sphere�*s problem is that most cities just aren't las vegas, and it's going to have to find a way to operate these spheres in major areas where people actually live. and that is a bit of a conundrum for sphere. last week, we brought you some of the highlights from the consumer electronics show here in las vegas, amazon has been fined s2

million euros in france for surveillance of workers. the data protection agency says it attracts employee activity so precisely that work is potentially have to justify their breaks. amazon disagreed with the findings. the new hampshire attorney general�*s office has said thousands of phone calls claiming to be from us presidentjoe biden with calls using a ai—generated voice. on the call, the president allegedly told voters to skip the recent primary election in the state. republicans have been trying to push voters to participate in the primary, what a bunch of malarkey. the primary, what a bunch of malarkey-— malarkey. the president has said there — malarkey. the president has said there are _ malarkey. the president has said there are risks - malarkey. the president has said there are risks with - malarkey. the president has| said there are risks with deep facts — said there are risks with deep facts and _ said there are risks with deep facts and fake images and misinformation can be exacerbated by emerging technologies and that is why this president has directed the department of commerce, through the al _ department of commerce, through the ai safety institute, at nist _ the ai safety institute, at nist to _ the ai safety institute, at nist to help deliver clear

content. nist to help deliver clear content-— nist to help deliver clear content. , , ., .y content. japanese space agency officials are — content. japanese space agency officials are scrambling - content. japanese space agency officials are scrambling to - officials are scrambling to understand how its robot successfully landed on the moon but now cannot generate electricity through its solar cells. the robot is currently relying on batteries to communicate with the agency. last week, we brought you some of the highlights from the consumer electronics show here in las vegas, but we couldn't fit it all into one programme, so we have more from those tech—laden aisles — including some of the latest innovation hoping to monitor and mend our health like never before. well, this device, which is the withings beamo, might be able to help us for some remote doctor appointment data. now, instead of having all the kit that you might find in a surgery, well, it does the basics like temperature —

there's a sensor that works just like this — you can also take an ecg byjust holding your fingers here, and it will also provide you with your blood oxygen levels. the most exciting feature, though, is that this works as a stethoscope — i know it doesn't look much like one. now, it syncs to an app that'll give you instructions as to exactly where you're meant to use it. you rub it across your skin and it'll take recordings. those recordings can then be sent to a health care professional because the chances are we can't really interpret them ourselves. you can listen to them through a pair of headphones, but this is reallyjust hoping to enhance the remote doctor experience with some of that vital data that you otherwise can't really provide. it's also another of a growing selection of health care products that help you be able to take regular readings instead of just those ones that you might do in a doctor's surgery. it should be available later in the year. and when it comes to getting a full picture of our health and wellbeing, medical gizmos and wearables can't do it all. you might also want to be aware of exactly what you've eaten, and it can be quite hard

to input that data, especially when the weight of what you're having needs to be put in. so here is caloai, a system that allows you to photograph what you're eating and it should be able to work out the content of it. it's not the most exciting of meals — just a bit of lettuce and chicken, so only 200 calories in there — but it also breaks down the ingredients. so you can see here the information for the lettuce and, here, the information for the chicken. it is also trying to assess how much you've had of each, which may be a little bit easier, if it's accurate, than trying to quantify it yourself. also, you can store all the data in here, so it means you can hang on to what you've had and even how much you've enjoyed it. not that i imagine that meal would have scored so well. elsewhere on the show floor... this device is trying to solve a problem that i think a lot of people would like a solution for. niostem is trying to overcome baldness. it's suitable for men or women and aims initially to prevent further hair loss, but after three months, it is claiming that it can start to rejuvenate the hair

again by stimulating more hair growth. if this works, well, it could be quite something. you pop it on just like this and wear it for s0 minutes a day and just get about your normal business — if you don't mind having this on your head, that is. this uses bioelectrical stimulation. how does it work? well, we are creating a gridwork on your head by pulsing with millisecond pulses through your entire scalp, thus energising and activating your hair follicles. the technology comes from wound healing and we cross applied it to hair growth. how did it do in the trials? it performed, actually, very well. we had a six—month trial and it showed that it was six times better than the leading drugs. you have great hair. are you going to tell me you were bald before? i had good hairfrom the beginning, but i worry a lot about it and i use it also every week. right, ok... i wasn't serious, but that's good. anyway, onto those who are hairier than most of us. it's notjust about us humans. this is minitailz�*s latest device. you can think of it as a smartwatch for dogs —

not that it's worn on a paw. it's actually worn in the collar here. now, the company has had previous devices that have tracked activity, but this time round, it's all about health, including monitoring for afib, which is an irregular heart rate, which can happen quite often in smaller dogs. it's suitable for dogs of all size. and then you can take a look at all of the data on a phone. then, all of that information is stored within the app. it's a mixture of the health data, plus what else this sensor is picking up. so it's also identifying whether the animal has been eating or drinking — and how often — and if it's been barking, maybe when it's left home alone. there's one sensor in there which manages to identify a lot of different things through the ai system, which is going on in the background, where masses of data is being crunched. and they're just some of the ideas showing how all of our future health could be better logged, recorded and predicted as mass data and ai come together. now, car tech was everywhere

at this year's ces. we had demos on the show floor as well as across the city. paul carter has been to see a race with a difference. these are no ordinary race cars. and despite the smooth overtaking, these racing manoeuvres aren't all that they seem. i'm at the las vegas motor speedway, and this is the indy autonomous challenge.

and none of these cars have drivers — well, not human ones, at least. indy autonomous challenge is a research initiative where we bring universities from around the world and companies that are working in the autonomous vehicle space, and we try to advance the technology through the platform of motorsport by running fully autonomous race cars with al drivers that are coded by top research university teams. the idea is to try to prove that autonomous technology can work at extremely high speeds. what you'll see is fully autonomous race cars racing each other, two at a time, passing each other at increasingly higher speeds until one car either crashes or gives up. and we can say that because there's no driver in it, so if it crashes, itjust costs some money. and, you know, the speeds that we've achieved in the past at this track have topped 180mph. this was a test day, where the various teams from top universities around

the world were tweaking both the cars and their ai drivers to try and gain maximum advantage. so what exactly are the challenges in trying to make an ai racing driver? well, there's multiple challenges, right? first is the perception, so getting all of the sensors, the lidar, the radar, the cameras to all work right. you have the communication technology, so how do you have really low latency communication? if the cars are moving that fast, you need to stay connected with them all around the track. and then there's the uncertainty of what the different ai drivers are going to do. so if a car is driving by itself, that's one challenge.

if you put a second car or even a third car out there, now it has to predict what the other driver is going to do and that can be really difficult from a computational standpoint. everything that the opponent does, our car has to react to in real time the same way a race car driver would. as the car changes lanes, as it makes decisions to try to overtake, we have to predict and adapt and move in order to make real—time decisions that could cost us the win or the loss. the challenges to making race cars race autonomously is exactly the same challenge as having a human do it. as you can tell, there's a very small percentage of people in the world who can actually race these cars, and imagine getting a team of software engineers together and to try to make that a reality in software that's making decisions in real time to compete against other software that's making decisions in real time. so it's not a trivial task. like regular autonomous vehicles, the race cars in the iac rely heavily on lidar to identify their surroundings. one of lidar�*s big advantages is that it can operate in low light. and to show this capability off, the main event of the track week was pitting

the ai cars against each other completely in the dark. but as fun as watching self—driving racing cars hurtling around in the dark is, this isn'tjust about entertainment. there is a serious side to all this. the main goal of this project is to advance understanding around vehicle autonomy, with the aim of ultimately making self—driving cars operate more safely at higher speeds. much of the industry has focused on low speed automation, kind of the urban, suburban robotaxi. we saw that — and in 2021, we came out with a new challenge to say, "what if we could prove that this technology could work "at speeds, let's say, greater than 100mph?"

and we think this is really important because, eventually, if we're going to have autonomous vehicles, we really want those vehicles to keep us safe at speeds that humans are not really comfortable driving. and once you get to 100 or 1s0mph, unless you're a professional race car driver, you really shouldn't be driving at that speed. but think of what it would mean for the world to have cars moving people, moving freight at those kinds of speeds. the indy autonomous challenge is now expanding outside of the us, with races at iconic motorsports venues such as monza in italy and goodwood in the uk. autonomous driving technology continues to develop at speed, both on the road and on the racetrack. that was paul. and that's it from us in las vegas. we've had a blast. we certainly have. thank you very much for watching. hope you've enjoyed it, too. we'll see you soon. bye— bye.

hello there. saturday brought quite a bit of sunshine to england and wales. a dry day for many, and a lovely end to the day here in north somerset. further north, though, for northern ireland and scotland, the day turned out to be quite windy and we did have a fair bit of cloud coming in off the atlantic, associated with the jet stream pattern. well, thisjet stream pattern for sunday is going to be bringing a very mild air mass across the uk and we could well see some exceptional temperatures across northern areas of scotland through sunday afternoon, as we will see in just a moment. before we get there, though, the southerly wind at the moment is bringing occasional patches of drizzle to coast and hills for scotland and for northern ireland, although many areas will stay dry and have a dry start to the day on sunday. mild across the northwest.

we've got the cooler air across england and wales. a few mist patches to start the day on sunday. quickly clearing, and then a lovely morning for most of you. into the afternoon, though, a cold front will bring a spell of rain to northern ireland and western scotland, and some very strong winds working into the hebrides and the north—west of the highlands. 60mph, maybe 70mph, gusts here, but on the other side of the mountains, helped on by the fern effect, we could see temperatures get boosted all the way up to maybe as high as 16 celsius — well above the average for this part of the world. and the uk all—timejanuary temperature record stands at 18.s celsius, so 16 wouldn't be that far away from that. although we don't see those dizzy heights across england and wales, it is going to be a mild day nationwide. now, looking at the weather picture into monday, we keep the mild air across england and wales, but further north, the air�*s getting colder across scotland and northern ireland. between the two, we have got a band of rain. it looks like being quite wet across this area, with 20mm to 40mm of rain. could see a few flakes of snow over the highest hills

of the southern uplands. colder weather pushing back into scotland and northern ireland. i say colder, actually, temperatures are coming back closer to average. but across england and wales, still very mild. temperatures could reach 15 degrees in the warmest spots. heading into tuesday, that area of low pressure is working away. a ridge of high pressure follows in for a time from the west, so the cloud will thin and break and many of us will have a day where the weather will improve and get brighter with a bit more in the way of sunshine coming through. temperatures near average across northern areas, still on the mild side for east anglia and southeast england. the rest of the week ahead, often quite wet and windy at times in the north, dry and bright largely in the south. bye for now.

live from london, this is bbc news. doubts over the future of the un agency for palestinian refugees after israel accuses it of involvement in the attacks by hamas last october. the remaining presidential candidates have all been campaigning — we'll have the latest on the race for the white house. and king charles is visited by queen camilla, as he spends a second night in hospital,

following treatment for his prostate. hello, i'm sarah campbell. the future of the main un agency working in the palestinian territories has become highly uncertain, after israel presented evidence that some of its staff and resources were involved in the attacks by hamas last october. israel has called for the head of the organisation, philippe lazzarini, to resign. several countries have suspended funding for unrwa. mr lazzarini says that is shocking and something which threatens the ongoing humanitarian work in gaza. we'll look at how these developments could affect the people of gaza in the short and long term, but we begin our coverage with this report from our correspondent injerusalem, mark lowen. crushed from the air. lives, homes, families, and now the very mission set up