he and how do you find out what lives in a rainforest? well, here's one high—flying idea. i'm being swabbed! snow. icebergs. glaciers. continental ice sheets. if it's white and cold, it's part of the earth's cryosphere... ..and it shouldn't come as a surprise to learn that that is getting smaller. working out what's melting and where is important... ..and up here, nearly 3,500m above sea level, we've come to the high—altitude research station overlooking the aletsch glacier in the alps.

switzerland is home to 1,400 glaciers, of which aletsch is the biggest, and it's here that we find groups of scientists developing new techniques to watch the ice and snow and monitor their retreat. glaciers are water reservoirs that we have, which is important for groundwater replation. i think this is the important fact, but also if you lose this mass, you have instability in the mountains, so you have more landslides ongoing, more erosion. it is also a cause of natural hazards, avalanches, if there's a lot of snow and rock falls and similar things, if there's not enough snow and the ground destabilises. a very important one in terms of the energy transition is the hydropower generation. hydropower generation uses the water that runs down from the mountains — and if there is not enough water, they cannot generate enough power.

and if there is a lot of water, a lot of snow, they actually need to know this in advance to plan the generation. for all this, we of course need to know where the snow is, because that is the water of the future. there are two new methods being developed here to not just monitor the surface — how much it's melting, how fast the glacier is moving and so on — but also to find new ways of seeing below the surface. these two top antennas are transmitting antennas, and here we have a set of receiving antennas. so they're two different radars. this gives us a different, let's say, angle and perspective, and with this we can get an extra information that otherwise we would not be able to acquire. esther and marcel�*s team is using radar to penetrate deep into the snowpack. now, different formations of ice crystals reflect the signals back in different ways, revealing the internal structure of the snow, how deep it is and how dense it is.

after several weeks of taking measurements on snow cover across the glacier, the team will spend the next few months evaluating that data to discover whether radar really can shape future studies. but from the ground, you can only see so far. to get a wider view, you need the second method and go even higher up than this. the space measurements are needed to cover the area. it is simply impossible to cover a large area like the entire alps with ground—based measurements. konrad's project is training an ai system to predict what will happen to the snow next. the system has been trained on images from esa's sentinel—2 satellite network. these are a mix of optical photographs that we'd see with the naked eye, images in the infrared and some created using longer wavelength radio waves like marcel and esther�*s

ground—based system. what our model effectively does is it creates a time series. the satellites pass over every couple of days, and it's like a very slow motion video of the surface. and we acquire this video and process it. in our case, we have a local snow—depth pattern, and we want to predict, with the help of this sequence and also the new observation, what will be the next snow—depth pattern. now, these techniques are still in the experimental stage. if the teams can improve their methods, then they will no doubt prove invaluable in monitoring how the warming climate is changing snow cover around the world. for example, in greenland we have a huge area where we are looking for supraglacial lakes, we call them, which are lakes beneath the snow. the amount of lakes are giving an indicator also of global warming. and we can detect these lakes actually with radar signals. they are built up in summer

where you have no snow on top, and in winter, where you have the accumulation of snow, you can still see them beneath. in fact, these techniques could be used even further afield. we have radar systems which are observing the venus, for example, and on venus we have a very strong atmospheric contribution, and in order to go through this atmosphere, we need longer wavelengths, radio wavelengths to penetrate through it and then to see or to characterise, really, the surface of venus. venus famously suffered a runaway greenhouse effect that's made it the hottest planet in the solar system — and while earth's greenhouse effects won't be anywhere near as bad, we have to fight its effects. and adrienne murray has been looking at a promising solution back on our world. or at least...i think it is. adrienne: this isn't some faraway planet. these martian—like landscapes are found in iceland.

it could almost be a scene from science fiction. seemingly in the middle of nowhere, these towering machines are guzzling up carbon dioxide, a global—warming gas. so could this much—hyped technology help us fight the climate crisis? mammoth is the world's largest direct air capture and storage facility. what you see here are 12 of our collector containers. when the plant is fully operational, we'll actually have 72 around the plant. that will enable us to capture 36,000 tonnes of c02 every year. it works like a giant vacuum. each of these units is the size of a shipping container and has a dozen powerfulfans sucking in the surrounding air.

they pull in an olympic swimming pool�*s worth of air every a0 seconds. and then, inside, a filter separates the c02. in the atmosphere, its concentration is very dilute. capturing even small amounts requires lots of energy, and mammoth gets both power and hot water from the nearby geothermal plant. for us to do direct air capture effectively and efficiently, we want to make sure that we're using energy that has a low carbon footprint. some would look at this and say, "hang on, "where's the industry?" would it not be more efficient to have one of these next to a factory that's actually making the pollution? carbon dioxide tends to just disperse and diffuse in the air. the effectiveness of direct air capture is not dependent on being located close to industrial emitters. ok, i'll let you show me

where the c02 goes. that lowest line here, that's actually the c02 that's coming from those 12 containers outside. these two balloons are a really good visual representation of what, in total, one tonne of c02 looks like. this tower then works a bit like a sodastream, dissolving the pure c02 in water. from the top, we have water coming in, so, like a shower. it's sort of, at home, if you're making sparkling water, same idea. that fizzy water is sent to these igloo—like domes. so here we have one of our injection wells. please come inside. this well is going 700m down into the underground here. the c02 and water is pumped deep into the basalt bedrock, where it reacts and turns to stone. so you've got a couple of rocks there. exactly, yeah, i'm a geologist,

so i brought rocks. this is a fresh basalt here, actually, from one of the last volcanic eruptions here in iceland. you can see there's a lot of porosity in here. here you can see there's a lot of these pores now filled with whitish specks. some of these contain the mineralised c02. and carbfix says that happens pretty quickly. we're not talking about millions or tens of thousands of years. around about 95% of the c02 was mineralised here within two years in the pilot project. this is incredibly fast, geologically speaking. mammoth is climeworks' second commercial plant and almost ten times bigger than the last one, collecting 36,000 tonnes of c02 annually, about the same amount as taking 8,000 petrol cars off the road. but it costs a whopping $1,000 to remove just one tonne. what do we mean by removing emissions? among its customers

are microsoft, h&m and lego. worldwide, more plants like these are on the way, though they'll still only remove a fraction of what's needed. and despite calls to slash our emissions, the c02 we churn out continues to grow. do you think direct air capture can be an effective tool for removing carbon? we release about a0 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere every year, so this won't make a dent into the big problem. but i think you should use all methods and methodologies to fight this problem. what's it going to take to scale it up, bring costs down and make it really impactful? by the end of the decade, we want to be at a cost of capture of $300—400. technology improvements will help drive down costs. a second lever will be scale.

the team says this is just the beginning. mammoth will soon be dwarfed by another, much bigger plant, project cypress in the united states, which will eventually capture a million tonnes of c02 each year. from mammoth to cypress, we're now looking to break that hundreds of thousands of tonnes of capture capacity a year. i really do believe direct air capture and other engineered solutions are going to be able to get us to the point that we need to to help fight climate change.

is available in australia, canada, france and germany for the first time. it canada, france and germany for the first time.— the first time. it is fine, cris -. the first time. it is fine, crisn- it _ the first time. it is fine, crisp. it means - the first time. it is fine, crisp. it means that - the first time. it is fine, i crisp. it means that among other things, crisp. it means that among otherthings, is crisp. it means that among other things, is at the cinema experience in a way that i think is even better than the best cinema. that has not been a huge amount of content made for the headset as yet.- for the headset as yet. beware id is continuing _ for the headset as yet. beware id is continuing to _ for the headset as yet. beware id is continuing to expand - id is continuing to expand abroad, reaching a billion—dollar bill to build a manufacturing plant in tokyo. -- byd. it will manufacturing plant in tokyo. —— byd. it will be the second in europe. if you ever wondered where to recycle your rubbish? google has teamed up to produce an ai recycling avenue. load it up, point your camera at the object you want to recycle and the app will recognise it and

then tell you how best to dispose of it. how is al going to affect the uk over the next ten years? while attendees at the future of britain conference, organised by the tony blair institute for global change, don't possess clairvoyant powers, they are very well placed as some of the best informed people in science, the arts and government to try and help answer that question. in a speech opening the event, former prime minister tony blair made it clear he believes ai is key to the uk's economic success. it will change everything, and positively, if we embrace it in a spirit of innovation, not introspection. and new health secretary wes streeting says that al can play a role in the nhs. doubling the number of ct and mri scanners, and notjust more scanners, but ai enabled scanners, those are massive productivity gains.

as founder and ceo of pioneering ai company google deepmind, sir demis hassabis has been developing ai for health care, scientific research and consumer use long before it was fashionable. it will transform everything, so it will be at least as big as the industrial revolution, possibly, you know, bigger, more like the advent of electricity or even fire. what does he think the uk's new labour government should do to make the best of artificial intelligence? i think it's a big opportunity, actually, for the country and the new government to embrace the economic opportunities that i think are going to come with al and also the scientific possibilities. so, helping with health care, drug design, but also climate. now, the new labour government has said that it wants to be a green superpower, and we know that, at the moment, this technology, artificial intelligence, is very, very power hungry. yeah. so how is that relationship going to work out in

the future, do you think? i think, in the short term, that's correct, there's a lot of power needed to scale these systems up. but most of the large companies, including google, have committed to green power usage and net—zero targets. the types of systems we're building, we're training on these large data centres will have enormous implications and good use cases for climate. so, things like getting more efficiency out of existing infrastructure like power grids. also, we're applying ai itself to save power in the data centres. so, i think, in the end, that what these ai systems do, you know, will save energy and power far outweighing what they're currently using. people worry about their jobs and job security. how will ai affect employment? ithink, like previous big, uh... ..sort of technological revolutions, like the internet or mobile, i think it's going to also create many newjobs, new types ofjobs that we can barely imagine

today. there's a lot of american investment, there's a lot of investment going on in china. where does the uk sit? yeah, i think if you look at it, of course, there's the us and there's china, the kind of two superpowers — they have the most investment, the most research. but i think, if you look at the next tier, the uk is right in there in the mix. so, partly to get the economic gains and the prosperity from that, but also to influence how it goes on the world stage. 0k, crystal—ball moment — how far away do you think we are from artificial general intelligence? so, agi is a term that we sometimes use in the field to describe roughly human—level ai systems that are capable of general solutions to problems, a bit like the human mind can do. and i think we're, you know, maybe... i wouldn't be surprised if it was sort of in the next decade, so perhaps a 50% chance in the next decade. sir demis hassabis, thank you very much indeed. thank you. life is brilliant!

it sprung up in almost every part of the planet, in every shape imaginable — and many that aren't. there's a lot of life out there still left to be discovered and described. and that's a fact — most of the world's flora and fauna are as yet undocumented. but that also means that we don't know what effects we humans and our ever—expanding civilisation are having on most of the world's species. if we start to lose this diversity, you know, and things can't be moved around and they can't adapt, then we sort of have a house of cards that's falling apart. and if we lose the key species in that, then we know we won't be able to restore our ecosystems. cue xprize rainforest — a five—year competition challenging teams from around the world to develop tech to find out what lives where. first prize?

$5 million. the mission — to design robots that can autonomously collect environmental dna, edna, from an area of rainforest and also to develop new techniques to analyse the biodiversity contained within that data. environmental dna, simply dna that's being shed off of every species. and our technologies are advanced enough now that we can just take a water sample or an air sample or a surface sample, and from that we can describe what species are living in a place. biodivx from eth university in zurich is one of the teams that made it through the semifinals in singapore and have been practising for the finals in the amazon rainforest in brazil. and today i've come to zurich to meet their autonomous drone. actually, what's important here is what's hanging underneath the drone.

that is a probe on about 50m of wire that can be lowered all the way through the vegetation down to the ground, swabbing dna samples as it goes. the swab is a simple piece of lint—free cloth that drags against the vegetation. and in case you're wondering why staying above the rainforest and swabbing down through it is the best idea, well, you've obviously never been to a rainforest before. they are pretty tough conditions, so rainforests have very extreme weather conditions, so it can be very hot, it can be very humid, so that's quite of a challenge for the sensor on board of the drone, for the camera. it can be challenging to detect obstacles, and then what is very problematic is to fly eventually inside the rainforest. so this is where it's, you know, extremely cluttered environment with many obstacles and so on.

and so the way we solve this problem is to stay above the canopy, butjust having the probe that goes inside the canopy. so in this way we are safely up, but we can still collect data from inside the vegetation where things are interesting and important to be monitored. the drone uses 3d scans of the canopy to work out how close is too close to the tree tops, and if the probe gets stuck, the drone is programmed to first wiggle it up and down, then to give it a sharp tug, and if all else fails, to cut the cord and return to base. but what's special about this probe is that it allows us to access the canopy, which is very hard. that's 20, 30, even 40m off the ground, and that's a place where we don't know very much about biodiversity. and so the ability to go in and non—invasively sort of swab this space and collect that dna is amazing, because now our other methods are to put up a poisonous gas and fog the tree and all

the insects fall out dead. this is, you know, maybe not what we want to do when we just want to know something's there. yeah, you're decreasing the biodiversity right there and then, aren't you, right? yeah. i'm being swabbed! a lot of chemicals in this hair! that's going to skew the sample! each team has 2a hours to collect as much edna as possible from one square kilometre of rainforest and then 48 hours to analyse the samples — and given that most of the millions of these samples collected will still be unidentifiable, teams are also scored on how well they can communicate the diversity of life that they find. and for biodivx, that includes turning dna into music. and so i got fascinated by this process of being able to communicate what it is that we're finding, because,

as i said, most of the things, we don't even know what species it is, we can't even put it in our tree of life. and so how do you communicate to people about things that they can't see and they don't know are there and we have no name for it? well, if you give it a soundtrack, then it's a wonderful way to allow people to connect with biodiversity when we don't have, you know, other means of communicating about what it is. is it a case, then, that in ten years' time, you might revisit the same forest and the soundtrack might have changed... yeah. ..and there's a danger it might have got more reduced in its variety? mm—hm, yeah. i have this sort of dream that, you know, if species are there in a place, and they've all been evolving and interacting and they're in harmony, that the music from all of them together should sound good, like a symphony, right? and if it's a system that's... you know, maybe the habitat�*s been degraded or an invasive species has come in, you would be able to hear that distortion because it would no longer be in harmony. the dna sequences determine the order of the notes, but then a human composer arranges the track into something that sounds good and brings the variety

of life to life. and in fact, this music you're hearing right now? well, it's composed from the dna of a honeybee, a bioluminescent snail and the silver timon tree. calm electronic music plays the xprize rainforest finals happen this summer in the amazon. and that's it for our dive into nature. hope you've enjoyed it, thanks for watching, and we'll see you next time.

hello. halfway point of the month and already there are a number of places were in excess of their rainfall. well over double four at loftus. more to come into this week as well as we will see in a moment. sunday was another pretty cloudy day. courtesy of the same area of low pressure in the north sea. across southern and western areas, spells of pleasant sunshine. temperatures in the warmer spots getting into the low 20s. that will change on monday and tuesday as the next area of low pressure pushes across england and wales to bring yet more rain. the first signs across wales and southwest england with heavy rain developing here quite quickly through monday morning

with rumbles of thunder probably around. reaching parts of the midlands and east anglia. the northern england, northern ireland and scotland, are largely dry date with some pleasant sunshine with temperatures into the low 20s. wales and south—west england, could be heavy enough to cause flooding. heavy downpours mixed in northwoods and its words. temperatures hovering around double figures. for tuesday, low pressure still not done with us. gradually moving into the north sea but it looks like some of the wettest parts of england so far this month was the another dollop of rain fall here on tuesday. further north, if few showers into eastern scotland, northeast england, isolated for northern ireland but on the whole scotland and northern ireland should have the best of the weather with

bright and sunny spell developing. temperatures when the sunshine comes out up in the sunshine comes out up in the late 20s. wednesday, something we have not seen very much this month, it is an area of high pressure. this looks set to settle the weather down for a time. most of us on wednesday, pencil in a dry day with plenty of sunny spells. winds are light and in the sunshine temperatures climbing up sunshine temperatures climbing up to 2a celsius in london. 2a is actually average for the time of year but it will feel warm in the strong july sun. pressure still trying to hang on. an atlantic weather system to northern ireland and western and northern parts of scotland. temperatures here will be dropping, back into the teens typically. for east wales, much of england and eastern scotland, we should see temperatures climb into the low

20s in the warmest spots. that area of low pressure does not look like it is going to bring a big change the overall weather pattern rather a blip of dry warmer weather because as we go into the following weekend, we see a return of atlantic weather systems bringing rain or showers and a return of a rather familiar feel to the july weather with temperatures generally running below average. the main message in the week ahead, make the most of that dry and sunny warm weather when it does come along briefly.

live from milwaukee this is bbc news. president biden urges the us to lower the temperature in an address from the oval office as the nation reels from the assassination attempt on donald trump. there is no place in america for this kind of violence. for any violence ever. mr trump is now in milwaukee, to attend the republican national convention. the fbi says his attacker acted alone using an ar—is style semiautomatic weapon.

hello and welcome to this special bbc news programme broadcasting live from milwaukee, wisconsin. president biden has addressed the american people in a prime—time televised speech from the oval office calling for unity and urging the nation to lower the temperature in our politics, he said, following an assassination attempt against donald trump on saturday. president biden called the attack on donald trump deplorable adding that we cannot and must not go down this road in america. let's listen to some of what the president said. yesterday's shooting at donald trump's rally in pennsylvania calls on all of us to take a step back. take stock of where we are, how we go forward from here. thankfully, former trump is not seriously injured. i spoke to him last night and i am grateful he is doing well, andjill and i keep him and his family in our prayers. we also extend our deepest condolences to the family

of the victim who was killed. corey was a husband, a father, a volunteer firefighter