badlands for you at the top of the hour straight after this programme. will have the headlines for you. this week... this is one of the most incredible things i've ever done. ..paul�*s in california investigating artificial arms, which encourage the mind to power the prosthetic. alistair�*s tackling the tricky issue of head injuries in rugby. the secret may be in the mouth guard. shiona's been speaking to the boss of the biggest genealogy platform, finding out what it technically takes to trace your ancestors.

and it's oscars season. we talk to the creator of the creator about its visual effects. no robots were harmed in the making of this programme, i promise. over the years on click, we've seen lots of advancements in assistive technology for disabled people. one of the areas that continues to develop is prosthetics — new materials and innovations are making them lighter, cheaper and easier to use. and paul carter's been to california for an exclusive first look at a revolutionary new type of prosthetic arm that's closing the gap between body and bionics. prosthetics have come a long way, from the early days of wood, tin or leather... ..to modern limbs made from carbon fibre and silicone. once basic, yet functional, they're now advanced and bionic. and here at atom limbs, i've come to see how the latest

technology is bringing the next generation of artificial arms. they're developing a prosthetic with a full range of human motion that's using signals from the brain to control those movements. the most advanced, state—of—the—art prosthetics we control today is what you call myoelectric control, so that's putting electrodes on your stump or residual limb. and the difference between what you would do today with a state—of—the—art arm versus with an atom limbs arm is we basically cover your stump in electrodes, and you, when you first put the arm on, you take about five minutes and you train it up. and what that looks like, is we say, "all right, with your phantom limb, "that we can't see, but you can, "flex your finger, extend your finger, "rotate your wrist, rotate it the other way." and our machine learning and ai system takes a huge amount of training and spits out a result so that now, you, whenever you think, can just move, so there's

nothing in your head, nothing on your head, nothing in yourarm. it's all this surface electrode and ai that basically powers it. the arm is worn via a strengthened vest or shirt, which the arm connects to via an interface, reducing the need for custom—made sockets or the input of clinicians. jason lost his left arm in an industrial accident in 2012. he's been working with atom limbs to test and develop their new prosthetic. tell me a little bit what this is like to operate. i mean, obviously, you're controlling this right now. you're moving this, essentially, by thinking about it. how are you thinking of that? what's the process that you're going through? well, just like with anything, like using your regular hand, i'm still thinking about the motions, and i have a phantom limb. it still feels like i'm just moving my regular hand. yeah. it's a little bit more difficult, obviously, because my muscles are...tiny! he laughs with a tmr surgery, they've actually taken _ the three major nerves that are controlling your entire

hand and integrated them into three different muscles. so now you're just... you're not flexing the entire muscle now, you're flexing just a portion of that muscle. and so there's a lot of concentration that has to go into. . . making those movements. it's not as natural, obviously, as moving your regular hand. it's... over time, and just with practice, i think, it's just become easier over the years. many existing bionic arms have a range of predetermined or programmable grips that the hand can perform, such as pinch grips or full fist. the atom limbs arm allows for individual finger control with ha ptic feedback. so you're getting vibration or something from the arm that's telling you when you're gripping the glass? yes, exactly. when i reach and i grab something and i hold it for a certain amount of time, right now, already, just at that point, it kicked in, and i'm getting some vibrational feedback here. so that's my indicator that i know that the hand is not going to automatically open and drop whatever i'm holding. and so it's...

it's... nobody else does that. and it's... compared to my old prosthetic, there was always... you had to constantly... i don't have to sit here and watch the baseball right here in my hand because i know it's got a good grip. although not an amputee myself, i was able to put on some sensors and try a digital twin of the arm via the control software. and it's safe to say it was a hit. no way! man chuckles withinjust a few minutes of training, i was able to perform several different motions and movements of the arm. what the...?! this is phenomenal. this is one of the most incredible things i've ever done. the only way i can describe it is it's like on a games controller, i've mapped different buttons to different muscles that i've got here. so when you said, like, "for the grip," well, i don't know what a grip feels like, so ijust chose

something that sort of feels vaguely similar. and that's the one i'm using to open and close the hand. and the same for the elbow. like, the elbow one's a bit easier for me to do because i have that range of motion, so that's, like, the most natural one. but for the grip... there we go, see? and then... the wrist is probably the most difficult one because i'm having to use a bit of rotation. this probablyjust looks really mundane to most people, but to me, this is incredible. the arm being developed here is still at an early stage. the company are gathering data ahead of regulatory filings in the us. of course, the biggest stumbling block for disabled people accessing new technology is cost — with the latest developments often being unaffordable, except for those with deep pockets. exactly how much the atom limbs arm will be is yet to be confirmed, though they claim the goal is to make it available at around the same price as a non—bionic arm in the us — approximately $20,000. as technology advances,

the hope is that prosthetics in the future will become more affordable, more versatile and, ultimately, more intelligent. that was absolutely amazing. that's the best workout i've ever had! cr-r-r! jason laughs nice! jason laughs nice! the six nations rugby union tournament is well under way, but there's something different this year that you might not even notice. yeah, players are wearing new mouth guards which can detect the impact of knocks and bumps and the data is then used in head injury assessments. it's part of a rule change rolling out across all elite rugby union games — and alasdair keane's been finding out more. it is a tiny, tiny chip in what looks like a normal mouth guard. yes, it is. essentially, what it does is it measures head accelerations. so how much does your head move — forward,

backward, rotational? it has a piece of technology in the left—hand side of the mouth guard, what we call the buccal cavity. and it's got some really interesting tech inside, so... we have now introduced these smart mouth guards into the head injury assessment process — so, essentially, whenever a player sustains an impact or a force or a knock on a field that's above a threshold that's been pre—identified, an alert goes from the smart mouth guard that they're wearing to the matchday doctor that's standing pitchside, and the player then will be removed and entered into the head injury assessment. so this is an addition to the process because, at the moment, there are a variety of criteria that result in a player being removed for a head injury assessment and those are typically observable signs and symptoms — so, like, the player looking

a little bit dazed or confused or taking excessively long to get up off the ground. are you expecting more players to be taken off, then, during a game? yeah. so there's the fine balance that we have to reach between wanting to flag players for having significant knocks and bringing them off, but we also can't just wrap the game and have an excessive number of players coming off. so we expect, based on where the thresholds are set that we've based from data that we've collected over the last two years, we expect about one alert per match. you have lots of players spread over a huge area. they're all going to have their mouth guards in, but you're still able to get that data back in real time. yeah, and the system is really simple. so it's a bluetooth—enabled technology. so it works off an ios device or an android device. so as long as you're within range of the bluetooth, which can be up to 50 metres, 100 metres, depending on the bluetooth frequency within the arena, it will communicate and give you live data. so, again, it will tell you if there's been a big head acceleration or the volume of head accelerations

that have happened. what we're seeing with this type of technology, which is common in iphones and all sorts of other electronics, is they're getting smaller and smaller. and we believe that this technology will just continue to get smaller. the battery technology is becoming smaller as well. whistle blows so i'm obviously a fraction of the size of an elite rugby player. i wasn't hitting anywhere near as hard as they do. did it register anything? in the background, it's picking up the tackles, but for our application, it has to hit a certain threshold. and you didn't reach that, which is great. i've got some examples here, though, of what this might look like over the course of a season for a professional athlete, if you want to have a look. yeah, let's do that. you can click on the individual events themselves and you can actually look at where the individual received the impact. so from the mouth guard, it can detect where

in the head was hit. the mouth guard's connected, it's on the teeth, which is connected to your mandible, or cranium, sorry, so it can detect where on the...head or on the upper body that the actual impact came from. this comes at a critical time for rugby. scores of former players have launched a legal action against governing bodies over the long—term impact on their health from playing the game. but it's advancements in technology that make this new monitoring procedure possible, and officials hope that will make the game safer. there are voices from experts and former players who say, actually, the game should be changing. you shouldn'tjust be introducing these mouth guards, you need to stop the big hits from happening. mm—hm. is this enough? that is a hard one because rugby is a contact sport. there will always be an element of contact to it. so what we need to do, in our roles in the player

welfare space, is try and make that contact as safe for players as possible. so ultimately, this technology, it will lead to changes to the game and changes to the way players train. but now we need to collect data from players over a period of time to then really understand what the game and training looks like for these players, and we can then make changes. you're going to gather all this data. once you have it, is there actually an appetite, though, to react to it and change the game? absolutely. i would say, without a doubt, we've had incredibly warm and responsive responses from teams and from players and various coaching staff. i don't think anyone would deny — or, largely, everyone would acknowledge — that the game needs to continually try to make safer, and we need to reduce this impact to players. so absolutely, everybody is on board with it, and i think we have more power behind it by it being based on evidence and by being objective, because a lot of rugby and a lot of monitoring contact and impact in rugby is very subjective.

i, standing on the field, might look different to what you will perceive to be a different level to...you standing on the field, but then also different to then what the players are actually experiencing. so by now having these numbers... everyone says we need the data to drive the change, but, yes, the desire is there for sure. this is still new technology being used on this scale for the first time. there's going to be continued scrutiny of the data it collects and how that informs the debate on changing the game. my father was a holocaust survivor who never spoke considered one of the worlds largest criminal ransom where groups. they have also been involved in the operation. scientists have detected a quasarin scientists have detected a quasar in space with one of the brightest and fastest growing black holes ever seen. astronomers say the rate at

which the whole is digesting other material, which is one solar mass per day is what makes it so unusual. irate solar mass per day is what makes it so unusual. we found the object _ makes it so unusual. we found the object and _ makes it so unusual. we found the object and found _ makes it so unusual. we found the object and found a - makes it so unusual. we found the object and found a rough . the object and found a rough spectrum of that which is how we decide how far away it is and we got that on the small telescope in australia and went to the very large telescope which is part of the european observatory in chile we got a much more detailed spectrum of the object. the worlds longest distance by drone is launched according to the company that makes it. based in norway, they have designed an autonomous service so they can have groceries, meals and medicines flown straight to their door. introducing enhanced identity checks for its users in the uk, us, braziland checks for its users in the uk, us, brazil and mexico. this requires a video selfie and a valid id to check of both match.

my father was a holocaust survivor who never spoke about his background. and over time, as a child, i began to learn a little bit about his past. and as i became an adult and learned more and learned about his real name and his story, i used ancestry to discover more about my family past, my father's story, and made incredible discoveries. through ancestry, i found ship manifests, ifound concentration camp records with his name and the names of his fellow prisoners who became his friends through ten concentration camps over three years in germany, poland and france. anna's just one story whose family history has been brought to life through the power of genealogy company ancestry. she found records, dates of birth and real names to unite with other survivors' children across the globe.

we discovered that our fathers had been friends for all that time, and we created a new bond and connection to honour the bond that our fathers had had during the holocaust. everyone has been so excited to meet you and talk about your father. i hope they are looking down at us and seeing | this, because if that's the case, then we... i we did good. one of the things that we like to say is, you don't know where you're going if you don't know where you're from. so much of your life today, the life you live, were made by choices, people 200 years ago, 300 years ago, people who... you know, my parents immigrated to america in the 1960s, and i'm only here today because of the choices they made as well. and so really discovering the stories of resilience

and how somebody came from one place and went to another, they built a family, they built a home where you can trace your roots, that is such an important part of who we are. and it also tells us how much resilience we have to have for the future as well. so what does the future of the company look like? and how can technology play an even more pivotal role? al's actually been a part of our company for a long time. we did the 1940 census and, in america, the 1940 census took us nine months to code, so it was actually manually written and we had to scan each one, we had to index them, we had to actually have people key things in. the 1950 census, which we did last year, we actually were able to do it in nine days. we were able to scan, because using machine learning and handwriting recognition, we were able to actually get discoveries to our customers so much faster. and that's with the help of ai. with a! capabilities only getting better, it's hoped that families will be able to find

elusive records that they've never found before. none of them would have ever dreamt that it was possible that, one day, their children would all find each other and create this bond of friendship to honour the bond that they had. i think that my father would have been quite emotional, quite touched and really grateful that i could share the story with them, that we could, together, honour the memory and understand how important it is to preserve and share these memories. because it really is... you know, it's history. it's not just our family story. it's a very important time of year in hollywood right now — it's the lead—up to the oscars. and the category that we always get really excited about is visual effects. mm—hm. so let's take a look behind the scenes at one of the frontrunners. right now, artificial intelligence is on everyone's minds. but what might happen if it became way more advanced and intelligent robots became part of our society? would we accept them as real people?

the 2023 movie the creator imagines such a future, but one in which — surprise, surprise — things go badly wrong. rapid beeping if the crew is small enough, it's cheaper to fly anywhere in the world than it is to build a set. when gareth edwards shot his movie, he wanted to save as much money on the traditional elements of movie—making as possible, so more could be spent on the c61. it was, essentially, trying to get back to all the pros and positive elements of doing a guerrilla film. so gareth took charge of the camera himself, moving around, improvising, hunting for angles and getting off—the—cuff performances from actors, all the while keeping the production team as small as possible. and as gareth would move around and frame on the actors, if you were to have an overhead view of what was happening, it was like this little snake behind gareth, because whenever he moved, we all shuffled behind him so that he had the freedom to just have the actors

running up and down. and we...just stayed behind him, stay out of the frame. it almost felt like a student film. it was very indie. gareth�*s background in visual effects also persuaded industrial light & magic to dispense with a lot of the expensive planning that goes into cgi shots. he was confident they could paint in whatever was necessary afterwards. some of the money saved could then be spent creating moments that make the robots seem more human. he appeals t0 child we went to, like, a real village in the himalayas and we shot real families just existing — an old ladyjust giving her grandson a chocolate bar, whatever — and as i'm filming it, i'm thinking, "oh, my god, if we can make her a robot..." i've never seen that in a film before, like the idea of something so intimate and beautiful, but with al. and so, like, these were the sort of shots i was trying to find and give to ilm. often, visual effects, because it can be expensive

to complete a shot, you really reserve it for those hero moments... and so you wouldn't get some of those throwaway moments that many people have responded to. iwould... i basically didn't tell people towards the end whether they were going to be a! or not in the movie, which made the visual effects really difficult because we didn't have tracking markers or anything on anybody. i found that once you tell someone they're a robot, they start behaving like a robot. but while the movie still spent a lot on the creation of the robots themselves and also on the big action sequences, new camera technology helped to speed up the shooting and reduce the crew size even further. we shot the movie on a new camera that came outjust before we started filming, which was called the sony fx3. and it's kind of the size of a domestic mirrorless camera, and it meant just working backwards. the camera was small. it meant it could now go on equipment called a gimbal, which stabilises the shot.

and then because of the sensitivity of the camera, it meant we didn't need really powerful, crazy, massive lights on big cranes all the time. we could have battery—operated led lights. and so just like you have a boom operator with a microphone, we had what's called a best boy — nancy, her name was — and she had a pole with the light on the end. and so as we're filming a scene, i suddenly want to go round here. normally on a movie, that would take 15 minutes to move all the lights and move all the equipment, i would just move with the camera and she would move with the light. and within, like, five seconds, it was re—lit like another set—up, as it's called. and it was a massively liberating thing that i think helped us basically do it a lot cheaper than a normal film. in order to help the digital artists match their cgi to the action—causing camera, locations are often 3d—scanned using lidar. and even here, the kit used on the creator

was really boiled down to the bare essentials. i have a lidar scanning app on my iphone. it allowed me, within five minutes, again, when the team would break and then i would have the space to myself, that i'm able tojust wander around and paint those details in. just pointing the phone around to the walls and ceiling will allow me to create a representation, a 3d representation of that scene. so a top tip — always have a lidar scanner in your pocket. never know when it's going to come in handy. exactly! brother. they found us. we weren't careful enough. i have no doubt at all that when a! turns up, we will treat them as people. i mean, even messing around with chatgpt now, and just out of curiosity, i'm really careful at the end to thank it and apologise if i've offended it because i know it's like... they're going to be our new overlords at some point.

thankfully, because i made this film, though, i'm going to be let off the hook. so when you're all rounded up, they're going to be like, "leave him. he gets us." lara: good luck - to all the nominees. the oscars are on the 10th of march. and that's all we've got time for. yeah, thanks for watching and we'll see you soon. bye! hello there. as the weather turns a bit drier, so the weather tends to turn a bit colder at this time of year, and that's what we are seeing, really, at the moment. we are in that colder air right now there is something a little bit milder in the atlantic, but that comes around an area of low pressure, bringing some rain. that will slide into more southern parts of the uk.

most of the wet and windy weather, though, heading its way into france, so we are left in that cooler air, where we are going to see some sunshine and some showers. the showers will develop in a few more places through the day on saturday, but not as many as we had on friday, and those early showers in the south—west will push eastward into the south—east of england by the afternoon. the winds are going to be light, temperatures not changing too much — 9, possibly even 10 degrees on saturday afternoon, but those temperatures will fall quickly. there will be another frost on saturday night, except in the south—west, where we've got this low pressure sliding in from the atlantic, and that is tracking towards the far south of wales and the south—west of england, and then that rain will tend to pivot back towards the south—east of england. so, generally, south of the ma, it looks like we're going to see some rain on sunday. the winds will be picking up later on, as well. away from here, a lot

of dry weather some spells of sunshine, again, one or two mist and fog patches, and those temperatures still around 8 or 9 degrees, with the odd shower in the far north—west of scotland, so, fewer showers, again, on sunday. we are going to find this ridge of high pressure building in from the north on monday but we've still got that low tracking across towards france. that's going to keep more cloud pushing into east anglia and the south—east of england, and we've still got the potentialfor some rain to hang around in these areas, as well — notjust that, but it's also going to be windy. we've got strong to gale force north to north—easterly winds, which will make it feel chilly. elsewhere, looking dry, some sunshine around, as well, and, again, we are still in the same sort of air mass, so temperatures are 8 or 9 degrees, which is normal, really, for this time of the year. that low pressure does finally pull away, taking the wet and windy weather away with it, and then that ridge that builds in from the atlantic shrinks again as another weather front arrives in the north—west. that will be accompanied by some strong winds, as well. we are going to find rain pushing across scotland and northern ireland heading towards the far north—west of england and north wales later on in the day — but the midlands, and, this

time, towards the south—east, are likely to be dry, and temperatures will peak at 9 or 10 degrees on tuesday. now, that weather front, as it moves its way southwards, is just going to die out. the rain's going to fizzle out on it we may see a bit of ridging coming back in from the south—west, so, by the time we get to wednesday, it's looking generally dry, got a few showers, mainly towards the far north of scotland. otherwise, probably a chilly start. we should see some sunshine before it tends to cloud over in the north—west later on in the day. so, not a great deal of rain through tuesday and wednesday. it may well get wetter, though, by thursday and perhaps into friday. this area of low pressure coming across the uk, picking up the winds, as well, later on in the week, and that low pressure is going to sit around for a while, as well. this is the jet stream pattern. you can see that marked buckling in the pattern, that slows things down. we are in somewhat colder air, i think, by the latter part of next week, and still with that area of low pressure, still keeping some showers going, as well. that slowly fades away, pressure starts to rise, and then it's all eyes on this. could this build across the uk, eventually, later on, and maybe bring some much—needed dry weather? we'll see.

goodbye.

live from washington. this is bbc news.

this is a bbc special programme on the two—year anniversary of the war in ukraine. ukrainian forces remain determined to repel russian forces, despite dwindling military supplies and wavering international aid commitments. we'll look at the state of play on the battlefield. and the impact on ukrainians and the country's prospects for victory. thank you forjoining us. welcome to this bbc news special programme — marking the two—year anniversary of russia's war in ukraine. over the course of the war, ukraine and russia have each suffered huge loss of life on the battlefield. and now kyiv�*s counteroffensive is struggling — as the kremlin continues to strike ukrainian cities — and make significant territorial gains. this map shows the areas of russian controljust before its forces invaded ukraine on february 2a, 2022. russia held crimea, which it annexed in 2014 — and russian—backed separatists

controlled a small section in southeastern ukraine.