this is bbc news, the headlines: the chinese government is now saying at least 170 people are confirmed dead from the coronavirus outbreak. there are more than 7,000 confirmed cases. the world health organization will meet later on thursday to decide whether to declare a global health emergency. the white house has warned president trump's former national security advisor that his new book cannot be published unless classified information is deleted. john bolton's lawyer insists nothing in it should be considered classified. comments in the book, it's reported, directly contradict the president's defence in his impeachment trial. the european parliament has ratified the brexit transition agreement, the final hurdle before the united kingdom leaves the european union on friday after 47 years. negotiations now begin on a final agreement, which the british government hopes to conclude before the end

of the year. now on bbc news, click. this week: building the next generation of spacecraft, dropping in on china and ripping up the streets of post—brexit london. three, two, one, zero. getting into space is

an expensive, dangerous, highly complicated business, where hundreds of thousands of precision—made parts all have to work together perfectly. if they don't. .. but as the race back to space hots up, commercial ventures are looking for simpler, cheaper, quicker alternatives to building spacecraft. and here in la, ifound a startup trying to solve all of those problems in the unlikeliest of ways — by 3d printing rockets. this is relativity space. existing rocket bits are not 3d printed. what is the advantage of 3d printing? a lot of it, from our perspective, is flexibility. traditionally, factories are made of tonnes of fixed tooling. it's then very expensive, very hard to change, then where you have to retool

a factory in order to make a new product or even change a product slightly. for us, we can change all of that in software. so it's digitising the manufacturing process and providing that flexibility, where, if you push new code to the printers and the hardware on the factory floor, you can actually make an entirely different product without changing anything in hardware. after a stint at spacex, jordan formed relativity space with his friend and ex—blue 0rigin engineer tim ellis. the two twenty—somethings realised that 3d printing could help in several ways. because it builds up objects layer by layer, it can produce complicated structures out ofjust one part. also, much of the manufacturing can be done autonomously, which leads to a rather remarkable aim. the team wants to send robots to mars, which can then build rockets on the surface.

and that means that the astronauts who eventually land there will have a way of getting home. it's both better, cheaper, faster. it's going to actually evolve more quickly than other technologies and we'll launch factories to mars, to actually build things like housing, spare parts and infrastructure, and eventually leading up to printing the first rockets. why has no—one done this before? no—one‘s had a printer big enough to print something that big. and a lot of the challenge we had as a company was making printers big enough to make entire rockets within them. this is what the printing process looks like close up. a robot arm weaves backwards and forwards to lay down a thick layer of special high—strength aluminium alloy. so this is it, the world's largest metal 3d printer. it's currently printing the top of the first stage of the rocket, so the first bit that burns its fuel and is then jettisoned. this is the top of that.

and if you look really closely, you can see that it's very slowly rotating. it takes about an hour to go all the way around at the moment, and that means that the robot arm — with all the hot stuff and the liquid metal stuff — can stay relatively still as it weaves each layer. and that means you get a lot more precision. the whole thing will take about 10—12 days to print. i can wait. i don't know about you. and why have one giant 3d printer when you can have several running in parallel? they're basically off—the—shelf robot arms, all arc welding different rocket stages that, when put together, can stand 30 metres high. in its first five years, relativity space has already secured contracts with nasa and others. and next year, it hopes to make its first launch from cape canaveral in florida after becoming only the fourth commercial company to secure a launch there alongside

the united launch alliance, blue origin and its la compatriots, spacex. and, sometime after that, mars beckons — and the promise that anyone who journeys to the red planet is not making a one—way trip after all. departing the planet may be a trip for just a few hardy souls, but this friday, more than 60 million will be making a pretty historic departure themselves. now, don't switch off because where we're going is ever so slightly past the bonging, or not bonging, of big ben onjanuary 31st. no, we're going a few years into the future, where, according to the makers of one video game, things post—brexit are not going well. the game is the highly anticipated watch dogs: legion, in which makers ubisoft suggest that society has, shall we say, deteriorated a

bit. marc cieslak was invited by ubisoft to their hq in toronto to take a very special look inside the game before the launch. this isn't the real piccadilly circus. none of this is real. come to think of it, i'm not even real. this is a virtual version of me reporting from inside a video game. ah, london! had a good run there for a while. watch dogs: legion imagines a dystopian vision of a post—brexit britain, a surveillance state governed by an oppressive regime. the player assumes the role of an activist and hacker who must recruit in—game characters to their cause and ultimately bring down the government. we need to recruit a resistance. legion‘s the third instalment in the popularfranchise, developed by video games company ubisoft in its toronto studio. we're taking a lot of just influence from what we

see in the world. whether it's the current political climate, whether it's emerging technology, we find ways that we are inspired by those things, ways that we're maybe a little bit afraid of these things and then we extrapolate out. a large area of london has been mapped for the game, and every character that you meet is playable — their backstory and personality, as well as characteristics, filled in by the game's artificial intelligence when the player approaches them. any character that you see in the world... i guess they're kind of like a level of dumbness, right? and then, as you're paying attention to the characters, they get smarter. as you're profiling them, and as you're getting more interested in them and as you decide to recruit them, we layer in more complexity into the character, but we always keep it consistent with what you initially saw. technically interesting innovations, but is it asking for trouble using real—world events like brexit in a game? the british people have

spoken and the answer is...we're out. i want to put that to the game's creative director clint hocking. but for this interview, we're going to attempt something which has never been done before. i'm going to perform an interview with a developer of a game inside their own video game. in orderfor my 3d model to be created, they're going to need a whole bunch of images of me, which is what's going to happen in here. to do this, every minute detail of my face and body needs to be scanned so i can appear as a game character. and three, two, one... that was great. it's not like the photo me booth at the railway station. real big! it's incredible how little we use our face like that, right? next, it's on with the performance capture suit, marker dots painted onto my face and i'm fitted with a head rig, which captures my facial movements. now, be honest with me. how do i look? is someone going to call

action for us or are we just going to go? now we're ready for virtual lights, camera and action. clint, why did you set this game in london? well, you know, marc, i think london is an incredible city to set a video game in. it's not just full of culture and historic landmarks and all kinds of amazing places that people want to go to and visit, it's also an incredible city full of cultural diversity. it was really important for us to be able to make sure we were simulating, not just the city and everything that's going on that you see around you, but also the population and her people. brexit has been hugely divisive in the uk and quite a lot of people are going to be quite angry that it's been included in a video game. well, i look at it as a creator of culture. if we were creating films or movies or books, it's the same with

video games, you know? it's our responsibility to look at the things that are happening in the world around us and have something to say about that, to create something that's meaningful and that people can look at and engage with and it speaks to the world that they live in. this game's been in development for four years and global events move very, very quickly indeed. have you included any more of those events in the game itself? well, marc, things are changing around us all the time. and every day, we have to look at what's happening in the world and make decisions about what we're going to be able to include in our simulation. we look at regulations for drones flying in the skies, there are autonomous vehicles in traffic and we have to think, "are these things that we want to include in our simulation and make playable for players in our game universe?" so it's something we think about a great deal. clint hocking, thank you very much indeed. thank you. this is marc cieslak for bbc news, in a virtual version of london. hello, and welcome to the week in tech. it was the week saudi arabia was accused of hacking the phone

of amazon's billionaire founder jeff bezos. crown prince mohammad bin salman is alleged to have sent an encrypted video file via whatsapp, which saudi arabia denies. it was revealed that since the introduction of gdpr in 2018, the eu has imposed 114 million euros in fines, with regulators in france, germany and austria handing out the biggest fines so far. is it a bird? is it a plane? yes and no. it's a pigeon bot. researchers at stanford university have built a robot bird using real pigeon feathers. the team believe their findings could inspire future aircraft wing design. quite the coup! how would you feel about sharing a ride in a driverless car without a steering wheel? the origin, made by general motors' own crews, is also missing pedals and a rear—view mirror. its developers, which also include honda, hope that multiple—occupancy electric vehicles will reduce emissions, accidents and congestion. and finally, spending too

much time on your smartphone? google suggests putting it in an envelope. google envelope is an app used in conjunction with a paper cover you can print out at home. the combo can dumb down your device so it can only make and receive calls or transform it into a photo and video camera with no screen, although it only currently works on the pixel 3a. will it work? answer‘s on a postcard. a couple of years ago, amid terrible wildfires in the us, we went on location with california's firefighters to see how they were using tech to battle the blazes. drones have become a big tool in the firefighters' arsenal, but for how much longer will they fly? earlier this month, the trump administration called for all chinese—made drones to be banned from governmental work.

and where are most drones made? yeah, that's right. fears were raised that they could be used for spying — and the us now wants its own drone tech to catch up with china. this, then, is another tech battle brewing between the us and china. and could this ruling ultimately effect innovation in delivery? and with such a large population, china is looking at this — and many other ways — to speed up the delivery process. it's already making a lot of headway, so could president trump's anti—chinese stance now end up stymieing us innovation in this area? stephen beckett delivered this from guangzhou. when you think of drones, perhaps

you think of something like this. or maybe this. well, how about this? so this is ehang's testing headquarters in guangzhou, and this is their passenger drone that they are developing. the idea is that this could ferry passengers from a to b around the world and it could even be flying in the skies in the next couple of months. it can go 135 miles per hourfor up to 35 km, so you can imagine if it takes off, it could be a pretty quick way to get around. so this what it looks like inside. got a little cockpit that you can climb into and you can close the door. get yourself nice and cosy. and there's even a seat belt. this can carry up to 220 kilograms, so a couple of passengers, and... you know, it's pretty cosy but if it gets you there quickly, that could be all right. the whole aviation industry has, you know, existed for a century and there was nothing fundamental changed in the past one century. ehang as a company, we started to think about building

a passenger aircraft, you know, self—piloting ones, starting from many years ago. we thought, is there any alternative? is there any way that we can make a safer, you know, aircraft in the future? at the moment, they're working on getting commercial approval to fly flights over the city. but they haven't got that yet, so that has to go up unmanned at the moment, so we'lljust have to watch. wow! that is pretty serious! imagine that flying over your city. you'd definitely know about it. it's certainly a glimpse into the future and it could make delivering people and packages very quick indeed. but instead of going physically faster, another way for deliveries to arrive sooner is to store them closer to where they need to go. jd.com, china's second—biggest online retailer, has been trying to dojust this in beijing. people in china don't tend to drink a lot of tap water.

that means, in cities at least, they're probably drinking a lot of bottled water instead. that means they've got to get it delivered to their house. and if they're doing that, then it's got to come from a place like this. this is a water station. to get water at the moment, you have to phone one of the many local companies. it's all very manual and can be quite slow. translation: people are no longer satisfied with a 24—hour or even a half—day delivery. what they want is a situation where, say, you're making your dinner at home, you need rice or water delivered to your kitchen asap — and there it is. jd could be called china's answer to amazon. it's got big warehouses. but that means they can only be so close to the centre of the city. and that's where the water stations come in. dotted around beijing, they essentially act as jd depots in miniature. so now, you order water on an app and jd automatically sends the order through to a water station close to you. it could be one just around the corner and they say that makes it really

quick. so, we wanted to see this in action. so our fixer has gone to a house on the other side of town. she's about to put in an order. we are going to chase it and see if it gets there. she's put the order in, so we are just waiting for it to come through. very exciting. follow that tuk—tuk! so we're here. took about 20 minutes. i think that's the fastest it can be. i think it can be anywhere from 20 minutes to a couple of hours depending on where they are in the city, how busy they are, that sort of thing. but all of this innovation may only be possible because of a unique situation in china. in china, delivery workers are not contracted. they aren't paid minimum wages or have any kind of social security net. and they're basically earning money on a piecemeal basis of, say,

50 cents for every delivery that they make. that leads to a huge number of precarious workers that really are supplying the foundations of the online economy in china. in developed economies like the uk, where there is minimal wages and wage levels are generally higher, the cut that delivery would take of many services would make them possibly unviable for people to buy. remember ehang? they've also been working on a trial to deliver, amongst other things, fast food. so this app actually lets you get things delivered to you by drone. there's a few different options, different people, that are offering the service. we'll get some fast food today — and i think we'll order six coffees because there's a few people here. we just need to pick our drone delivery zone. there's only one nearby, which is one just outside, and if we pay now, we should have some coffee! touchdown!

i'll see if i can get into it. this is a coffee that's come from, it looks like, mcdonald's. so presumably there's a mcdonald's somewhere that's got a drone port. that's it. back to wherever it came from. not entirely convinced that you want to do it to order a coffee, but you can imagine if you needed an urgent parcel or something like that, that could be pretty helpful. but you don't want that landing in your backyard, do you, really? i think drone ports like these make a lot of sense. there's no doubt that what they're doing in delivery here is pretty innovative. but the question is, can the business models that make sense in china still work in other places around the world? in the race to go global, the real challenge could be making sure that regulation and safety come along for the ride. that was steve in

china. now, much earlier than normal, we find ourselves in 0scars season. it's the academy awards in a few weeks' time. and between now and then, we're going to be meeting the people behind the most innovative developments in the movies that are up for the awards. and we start with this monster hit. whatever it takes. this show had so many challenges, i think, because it's such a pinnacle of the marvel universe. excuse me, mr hulk? yes. can we get a photo? smart hulk in particular was a real challenge because we were taking our facial animation to places we hadn't been. and to get that level of performance was definitely a real challenge. so, when they were shooting, they shot with mark ruffalo in place as smart hulk. he would wear a motion capture suit and also some head—mounted cameras to capture his facial performance. so that meant, once we got the shots turned over to us, we had a good amount of reference to get started with. although we had this amazing performance for mark, if you put 100% mark onto smart hulk, it wouldn't look like smart hulk. it would look like mark ruffalo pretending to be smart hulk.

so there was some amount of refinement we had to do to find that performance, to find the character. we used some machine learning techniques to enable us to capture his performance very quickly off of that footage and put it onto our initial model. we tried to get that really finessed human performance, which is probably one of the hardest things to do in cg. something else we took from our machine learning information was some of the really small micro movements. although we did most of it hand—animation, it was very important we could take these tiny little micro movements, like just very small bits of eyebrow movement, cheek movements, just really subtle so you can feed it back over the top of the hand animation to really capture the performance. the biggest problem, i think, we faced was actually the quantum suits that the avengers wear because, when they shot it — way back before infinity war — there was no design for the suits. so nobody was wearing a suit and no suit was ever built. so we had to work out several things.

one is how we were going to place everybody‘s costumes? because they were being shot in whatever costume the avenger happen to usually wear. in some cases, that created quite a few problems. some of the costumes that they were wearing have very high collars, so the newer suits that they would've been wearing wouldn't be covering all of that costume. so there'd be bits of their neck would be visible, which we'd have to recreate either in cg or in painting it back. and in some shots... the establishing shot when they first walked into the hangar altogether was actually shot with stand—ins. they've done the lines... we ended up replacing their heads as well. sometimes using a double, sometimes using pieces of plate from other shots. we could find a nice side view, stick that in because it was quite wide. but the other thing to bear in mind is in these shots, because we had to integrate

the lighting on the suits into the plate as well, we built a full cg hangar — which we needed anyway... there was a green screen behind them, where the windows are. and even though the green screen was outside the windows, we had to replace all the windows simply because we needed the reflections of what we are putting into the building anyway. so by the end of the day, the only thing that's actually left in those shots from what was filmed, is their heads and part of the ceiling. so we replaced the hangar as well. so, actually there was one shot in particularfor ant—man right at the beginning of the time travel testing. ant—man introduces the quantum van. that shot was originally in a different sequence, shot in a different part of the hangar, so the background was all wrong. so we had to take that and completely change it and change the environment, change the van. and then it was like, "oh, he's also in the wrong costume." so we ended up replacing his costume as well to put him into the ant—man quantum suit that he was wearing for the rest of the sequence. so that was another sort of last—minute, single—shot design of a costume to match what it was exactly like in the rest of the shots. people like to see the big flashy effects. the satisfaction comes, a lot of the time, from doing work, good work,

that nobody realises is there. so clever, isn't it? and we'll look at the secrets behind another 0scar nominee next week. that's it, though, for the moment from la. we will be back here in a few weeks' time for the academy awards. and during this week, why not follow us on social media, on youtube, facebook, instagram or twitter? your choice. hello there. we started off this week with a wintry flavour, cold for all of us.

but wednesday brought a day of contrast. it was a glorious afternoon across much of england and wales with some sunshine coming through, as you can see in bedford, and a little milder with it. different story, though, further north as we saw some heavy, persistent rain. some areas of scotland seeing over a couple of inches in a 24—hour period. now that weather front continues to drift its way steadily north. we've got a weaker area of low pressure pushing its way in from the south—west. but one unifying factor as we move into thursday and friday is a south—westerly flow will drive mild air right across the country. so wednesday morning we saw temperatures hovering around the freezing mark. but thursday morning, and it really looks as though it will be a different story. we're going to start of mild, 7—8 degrees widely across the country. so, yes, it's a mild start, but it's a rather cloudy, grey, drab one, unfortunately. there'll be some rain, some of it

heavy and persistent, moving its way up through western scotland to the north. and then behind it we've got quite a lot of cloud, thick enough for the odd spot or two drizzle, light patchy rain, misty, murky weather conditions, maybe some dense fog lingering in the far south—west. lighter winds to the south, but always strongest the further north and west with that rain. but look at this. those temperatures widely double digits. 10—14 degrees our afternoon highs. as we move out of thursday into friday, unfortunately, yet again, there's another frontal system that's going to push in from the west and that's going to bring more wet weather with it. now, the heaviest of the rain is likely to be through western areas for a time on wednesday. and as it pushes its way steadily eastwards it'll weaken, fragment to showers into the afternoon. but we're likely to see more persistent rain just clinging on to the north—west of the great glen. however, the wind direction‘s still a south—westerly, still mild for all, 8—11; the high. now, as we move out of friday for the start of the weekend, unfortunately it looks as though we're stuck in repeat. low pressure never too far away, but weather fronts crossing the uk, they ease away, a brief respite before

the next weather front which is in. so it does look likely that it's going to stay pretty u nsettled. so this is our city forecast for both saturday and sunday. it's going to be a case showers or longer spells of rain, but it's still on the mild side for this time of year, with temperatures widely into double figures. take care.

this is bbc news. welcome if you're watching here in the uk, on pbs in america or around the globe. i'm mike embley. our top stories: blockades and barriers. china's villages try to keep out strangers and the coronavirus. president trump accuses his former national security advisor of betraya, and the white house warns him not to publish his book. —— betrayal. # for auld lang syne, my dear # for auld lang syne...#. fraternal singing from some, flag—waving from others. brexit clears its final legal

hurdle in the european parliament. the sun as it's never been seen before. we'll talk to one of the scientists behind these new high—resolution images of its surface. hello to you. plans to evacuate foreigners from the chinese city of wuhan have been delayed as special flights haven't yet been cleared to leave. foreign governments have organised chartered flights to take their citizens out of the city as the numbers infected with the potentially deadly coronavirus continues to rise. authorities there say 170 people have now died, there are another 1,700 confirmed cases. hong kong is preparing to halve the number of flights to mainland china and suspend train and ferry services. john sudworth has the latest.