president trump, after his supporters stormed the capitol last week. mr trump becomes the first president to be impeached twice. speaker nancy pelosi said he represented a clear and present danger to the united states and no—one is above the law. in a statement released via the white house twitter account, president trump says there is never any justification for violence and he urges americans to be �*united'. there was no aknowledgment of his impeachment. and yet again he made no mention of his successor, president—electjoe biden. italy's been plunged into political chaos after former prime minister matteo renzi pulled his party out of government, leaving the ruling coalition without a parliamentary majority. the timing couldn't be worse with the country trying to rebuild the economy and contain the cornavirus pandemic.

the uk's major supermarkets have warned the government that an �*urgent intervention�* is needed to prevent more disruption to northern ireland's food supplies. since the uk separated from the eu, there've been new checks and paperwork on food products being shipped over the irish sea, which have caused delays. for over a week now, shoppers in northern ireland have seen shortages in some supermarkets. here's our ireland correspondent, emma vardy. overnight, the way we get food into northern ireland from great britain has hugely changed, and shoppers are noticing. i thought i would give everyone a quick update on local supermarkets in northern ireland. i spent an hour today driving round, looking for somewhere just to get fruit and veg. so i've just done a quick shop in my local supermarket. some very noticeable gaps, particularly in the frozen food section. hardly any frozen vegetables, but i did manage to grab some frozen peas. also in the refrigerated aisles where the juice normally is, really, really sparse

there as well. today, supermarkets said the initial delays with bringing goods over the irish sea are being resolved, but more red tape is on the horizon. new health certificates will be needed for food products arriving at ports like belfast from april, and now major supermarkets, including asda, sainsbury�*s and tesco�*s, have warned the government there could be more disruption in the coming months, saying increased bureaucracy and certification in such a short timescale is unworkable. absolutely, if we do not find a solution, and a workable solution, for retailers in the next couple of months, we do face significant disruption in northern ireland. the grace period for supermarkets and their suppliers... today michael gove, the cabinet minister in charge of brexit, responded to concerns raised by northern ireland's democratic unionists, saying that government would do more to make sure companies are better informed about the new rules they need to comply with. we are working with companies across great britain to help them understand

the new requirements for moving goods. and the extensive government support includes the trader support service, to which more than 25,000 businesses are now signed up. yet we know that still more needs to be done. that's why we are stepping up direct engagement with suppliers to ensure that they have access to the real—time guidance that they need. these initial gaps in supplies are expected to disappear. but supermarkets have said they want to discuss a future solution directly with the eu. if one isn't found, northern ireland may see even more empty shelves in the months to come. emma vardy, bbc news, belfast. now on bbc news, click. this week, we are tearing into 2021 at full pelt but what technology wonders may it hold? we'll ask the experts. and no, you are not having a bad dream, but an artificial intelligence is.

hey, welcome to click. happy new year? i hope you got some respite and a bit of a break recently. lara lewington! hello, how are you? i am good, thanks, all things considered. any new year's resolutions your end? absolutely not. don't do resolutions — that means i can't break them. i tell you what, i've decided to stay at home more and watch more tv. what's your plans for the next few weeks? i think i'll have a quiet start to the year and then, well, i guess we can only hope. but, in the meantime, if you're having that january wanting—to—get—fit feeling, then of course it is going to be a bit harder than usual this year, but you could take advantage of some of the tech platforms that did really well last year. they certainly benefited from the at—home exercise boom.

one of those companies is zwift, a virtual cycling platform whose subscribers are now in the millions. and this is no pootle in the park, either. in—app races have taken the competition to extreme levels, and jonathan coates threw himself into this to find out more. for many, cycling during lockdown offers escapism, and more people than ever are hitting the roads. but, for a growing number, the roads they ride on aren't tarmacked. cycling is a sport which has always embraced technology and now, it's taken the ultimate leap into the virtual world. zwift is an online platform that allows amateur and professional cyclists to train and compete against one another. its popularity has soared during the pandemic and now it has more than 3 million subscribers. by putting a normal everyday bike on a smart trainer — basically a treadmill for a bike with a bluetooth

connection — a rider's real—life physical output is converted into a moving avatar. in zwift, the resistance levels automatically change depending on gradients and conditions, and there is a whole host of other tech that can help add to the realism. the more advanced trainers simulate going over cobbles or through dirt tracks, and there are even fans that can match the wind speed to how fast you're cycling. but once you're plugged in, all you need to is start pedalling. you canjoin a group ride, do a workout, or simply cruise around some of the best routes in the world with maps, stats and data. so to see what all the fuss was about, i thought i'd get stuck in. the plan — to get fit enough so that five weeks, i could take part in a race on zwift. and, in order to do that,

i recruited matt rowe, a professional cycling coach who trains people through zwift. it is the future, for sure, for training, and that's for amateur cyclists who have got kind of four or five hours a week, right through to professional ranks. i mean, indoortraining, the benefits that it brings to performance gains speaks volumes. now, there's one key metric that seems to be the lifeblood of zwift, and that's watts. put it like this — your tv needs about 250 watts to work, and olympic gold—medallist bradley wiggins broke the hour cycling record by generating an hour average of 440 watts just with his legs. zwift bills itself as a training platform and, unlike many sports, this set—up can actually replicate many aspects of cycling with genuine road speeds and conditions, meaning that all the data you gather is comparable to what you get in real life. so matt has set me a test tonight to see how fit i am. basically, it's to see how hard i can push myself and how many watts i can generate. so i've got my screen down

here where i can see the training plan, what i've got to do, what he's going to put me on. it's 45 minutes, and it looks pretty brutal. at the moment, i'm doing 167 watts, or thereabouts. my legs are really, really starting to hurt now. that was one of the hardest things i have done... ..for long time. i mean, look at me, it'sjust horrendous. certainly, i had some work to do, and the training carried on five days a week for five weeks. but while you can train hard and make real gains, it feels like competition is the pinnacle of zwifting. it's where zwift goes to the next level, both for the users and for the company itself. suddenly, the platform switches from being training—focused to something more akin to an esports platform.

you can select a race, turn up at the right time and you are suddenly on the starting line with a huge group of other riders. and if you're good, there's serious money to be made from winning. i've heard from several zwifters who say "i've made more money on this one zwift race than i've ever made in an outdoor race that i've ever done". there's been some big cash prizes. at december�*s uci cycling esports world championships, the prize money was almost $10,000 for the winners. incredibly, female cyclists can make more money from winning races in zwift than in real life. so after five weeks of training, for five days a week, the time had come. it was race day. at 12:30 on a tuesday afternoon, the race began. and i had matt there on zoom to coach me through. pants. that's the most painful thing i've ever done. pants.

that was — i mean, it was genuinely really fun. there's a real kind of thrill of racing. it must be unique to zwift. if parents are worried about kids doing too much gaming at home, then get them on this because they'll get fit and, honestly, you can't do it for more than 45 minutes or you'll fall over. but it was time to hear the results. five weeks ago, i had a functional threshold power of 233 watts. so, had the training worked? today, you were 38 minutes, you did 288 watts. wow! so an extra 30, 30—odd watts, 3a watts, and you sustained it for nearly twice the amount of time. gosh! that's a massive increase. out of 32 riders, you ran 14th. hey! good result! you've got to be happy with that. there was what we call kind of �*sandbaggers' in the group. there were two riders who were minutes ahead of third

place in the cs. there were two guys in the race in my category, category c, who were considerably faster than everyone else. in fact, they came first and second with a minute between the third place, and it's these guys who are essentially are category a riders — they�* re really fast, really light, really powerful — competing in lower categories. you know, i came 1ath, but it sounds like i could have actually come 12th. and ifeel a little bit like — i don't know, ifeel a little bit cheated. perhaps where there's competition, there's always going to be cheating, and professional cycling has had its fair share of scandals and now zwift is having to deal with digital performance enhancement and other methods of manipulation. but as i began to find out more about cheating on zwift, one name kept coming up. well, i can say this guy's name, camjeffers,

because he — it was all over the news anyway. i don't like to be compared to lance armstrong. and i don't think it's unfair to compare me to lance armstrong. in 2019, cyclist and youtuber cam jeffers took part in, and won, the inaugural british eracing championships in london on zwift. but shortly after the race, he was given a 6—month suspension from all racing after british cycling ruled he had breached its disciplinary code during championships. i got a call one day from british cycling saying that they've had an anonymous complaint that my bike wasn't legit. and i was like, "you what? come and check my bike if you want. i don't know what you're on about!" zwift said the charge related tojeffers using a bot to ride for him to unlock a special bike in—game, thus giving him an unfair advantage over his competitors. jeffers claims that he obtained the bike for a series of youtube videos he was making earlier in the year, rather than for the race.

qualifiers — i remember saying to a couple of people, like, "do you not think, you know, should i not be using a bike that i've legitimately unlocked?" and they said "there's no rulebook. there are no rules been written for this event so there is no way you can get disqualified for using a bike that you haven't legitimately obtained." butjust like in any sport, there's a battle between those regulating and those trying to gain an advantage. cheers! let me say this, it was fair they took it away from him, but i think he could have won without the tron bike, so that's the sad thing. zwift are cracking down on any attempts to cheat in their races with the support of global cycling governing bodies. if the platform wants to be taken seriously, it has to maintain its sporting integrity. i think cheating is probably something we'll have to combat. it will never go away — someone will figure out how to game the system. but having said that, there are things we know we can

do, including hardware. so, for example, the world championships this year, everyone will be on the same bit of equipment. in addition to real world anti—doping controls that bar the use of performance—enhancing drugs, there will also be a group of analysts monitoring riders' race data for any red flags when compared to their previous performance stats. after just five weeks of using the platform, i got so much fitter but really, i was hooked, and it was the social element and the gamification that kept me coming back. people were showing up not for training, they were showing up because they crave that social connection. if i think about what zwift could be, it is certainly much larger than bike racing as a community. if it's a gamified training tool or an esports platform, zwift has hit upon something which has resonated with cyclists. and key to this is the fervent community that is building with youtubers, live streamers, online trainers, and social groups.

hello and welcome to the week in tech. it was the week that a request to extradite wikileaks founder julian assange from the uk to face espionage charges in america was denied by a court in london. employees from google and its parent company alphabet started a new labour union called the alphabet workers union. and volkswagen showed off its prototype fully autonomous electric car charging robot which it says will work in places like underground car parks. there were also reports this week that billionaire founder of chinese tech giant alibaba, jack ma, had gone missing after he hasn't been seen in public since october. mr ma had been critical of chinese financial regulators as not being innovative enough for technology development. mr ma had been preparing to list his group in what would be the world's largest initial public offering, but regulators shelved the

listing after his criticism. data from singapore's covid contact tracing app, trace together, can be accessed by police despite previous reassurances of privacy. initially, officials they said data collected by the app would only be used for virus tracking. researchers from the university of pennsylvania have showed a robot with a body made from ice. the concept, icebot, could be used in remote locations like antarctica and even mars. the robot was able to claim icy inclines of up to 2.5 degrees and clear light—weight obstacles from its path during testing. 2021, what on earth does it have in store for us? hopefully some better things than 2020. we've asked some leading tech experts to give us their predictions of things that might be just around the corner. boston dynamics kicked off 2021 in style with a robot routine fit for dirty dancing. but twisting isn't all droids are getting up to this year. i think we're going to see in 2021 is the increased prevalence of robots coexisting

in spaces with people. most robot helpers working today zip around controlled areas in factories or warehouses where bystanders can't get in their way. but many more robots are coming to public spaces like shops and hospitals. you may have people who are completely unaware that there might be a robot driving down a corridor. firms like starship technologies have even run on—street pilots before but 2021 brings unprecedented momentum. the market wasn't necessarily crying for more kinds of delivery but now because of covid and in agriculture because of brexit, we're seeing the market looking for solutions. but, berry picking prototypes

like this won't be the first to scale. running from the field to the pack house and back and collecting new trays, loading punnets on trays, kind of tasks where you could have a robot doing that. so what needs to happen first? you have very large test groups and you build up an assurance that the likelihood of something going wrong is minuscule. an area with other growing risks is cyber security. on your smartphone, app developers can build in tools taking advantage of the device's operating system to make the app safer. but that's not the case across the board. there are other systems that we rely on, whether that's automotive or medical or your smart city functions, that end up building every component themselves. we all can't be experts at everything so this is the year that they recognise that it's hard to do everything yourself.

a shift is needed but to what? well, what makes more sense is leveraging security functionality from platforms so we are not always reinventing the wheel with every different development team. there should be some places where it's appropriate to find, like libraries, find support from the framework on the platform. if you're wondering what's the worst that can happen if somebody hacks your smart speaker? well, it's notjust about turning the volume up. even if those devices are not managing anything sensitive, right, or you may not consider sensitive, they're still a launching point to attack your laptop oryour ipad. but although some data is best kept private, in some cases, it's better shared, even all around the world. 2021 will be the year when for the first time, a truly global collaborative artificial intelligence community will start working together.

some global data initiatives do exist but are generally limited to specialisms like cancer research in health orfraud analysis in finance. what is actually to combine all of this data together into a single corpus of information. it is a technical feat, sure, but there is a bigger impact here. if you want to know how to improve the healthcare systems, where do you start investing? and this investment will improve healthcare, what about schools, what about traffic, housing? all these items are correlated and artificial intelligence will help us understand that ecosystem as a whole much better. fascinating. let's see what comes to pass, shall we? ok, let's talk about something completely different now. lara, you know when you look at the clouds, sometimes you can see things in them, yeah?

oh yes! look at this photo, i took this over christmas. it looks like two angels having a chat. i'm always seeing things that aren't there, a bit like when you're in a dark room and there's a bit of a shadow and you convince yourself it's a person and completely terrify yourself. right, 0k, exactly. this is your brain making connections in your mind and spotting patterns that aren't really there. it turns out that artificial intelligence can also have an overactive imagination. so, you know how image recognition software works, yeah? yes, you feed it say, pictures of dogs so it can identify dogs for itself and then it will be able to see dogs in pictures. right. but if you ask it to look too hard, it will start seeing dogs everywhere. now, there is this google researcher who's name is alex mordvintsev, and he decided to turn this concept into art. he is the man who created

google deepdream. it actually happened in the middle of the night and i woke up with some weird dream of somebody entering the apartment, and i woke up and it was 2am. and i had this idea that i wanted to try and i was like, why don't i spend half—an—hour coding. and there was this cat and dog picture i was using as a starting point for that optimisation. the images i got were so surprising to me that i shared them in internal message boards. i think the exact text was something like, ok it's 2am but how can i sleep now after seeing this. the sun never sets on the google empire. and while alex was sleeping, it was afternoon in mountain view california and the image was going viral at headquarters. the unknown engineer

from the zurich lab was famous. i posted the actual code into our internal depository and the next week there were hundreds of people playing with this, and some images started leaking externally and i've seen the reaction of people outside. like, �*what the hell is going on, what is this?�* a lot of people were saying that this is similar to like a hallucinogenic experiences. we do see weird things, we see weird things on lsd. some of the images from deepdream seem like hallucinogenic images and that could point to a connection between machine vision and the visual cortex. right now, machines are quite primitive, quite narrow.

they can run deepdream and that's all. but we're running lots of different algorithms. we are machines, we are running algorithms all the time. and our algorithms can run awry. we can see things that aren't there, like a face on the moon for example. look at a cloud formation and you can see things in it but there are no birds in those clouds. then, my wife came along and said let�*s print some of the things you did, like these prints here, and also there were a couple of people who were really wanting to buy prints from me. so from that point on, i decided, ok, i can probably call myself an artist as well. we know that artificial neural networks work but we're not quite sure how they work and that's a central problem in al because after all,

artificial neural networks power driverless cars, as well as play a roll in the internet of things. and if artificial intelligence takes charge of critical systems and then goes wrong, it will be crucial for us to understand what�*s going on in the layers of its brain between the inputs and the outputs, between the stimulus and the corresponding actions. we hope that this work can shed some light on internal duration of the neural networks. it�*s probably when we design control systems we should make sure that they function in the situation where even inputs can�*t be trusted and outputs malfunction. i don�*t think that we are at the stage of full understanding. maybe there will be this idea of computer psychiatry. he laughs. well i guess we could all do with a bit of dreaming right

now, although i�*m not sure that�*s what i had in mind. yeah, that�*s way too much of a cheese dream that, isn�*t it? anyway, that is it from us for this week. as ever, you can keep up with the team of social media. find us on youtube, instagram, facebook and twitter at bbc click. thanks for watching, don�*t have nightmares and we�*ll see you soon. bye— bye. hello there. we�*ve got wet weather across many parts of the country at the moment but it�*s notjust rain. we�*ve got some snow falling, too, increasingly across scotland and northern england. we have this amber heavy snow warning from the met office. these are the main

areas of concern. there�*ll be snow across other parts of scotland and northern england. this is where we are expecting the heaviest snow to be. over the hills, 20cm by late morning on thursday, and some snow to lower levels as well inland. we have seen this band of cloud on that weather front moving its way slowly eastward. whilst we see milder air out towards the west, there�*s still cold air across northern and eastern parts of britain. that�*s why we�*re seeing the rain turning increasingly to snow, partcularly over the hills. quite a range of temperatures early on thursday morning. that wintry mixture of rain and sleet and snow continues across much of scotland and northern england throughout thursday. there�*s wetter weather through the midlands down towards the south—east and we could see a bit of sleet and snow in that, especially across lincolnshire for a while, and the midlands. it�*s going to be cold underneath that wet weather. temperatures 2—4 degrees. colder still over the high ground. much milderfor northern ireland and wales and the south—west, where it will be drier and we have some sunshine on the way

for northern ireland. during the evening and overnight, we will find a lot of that wetter weather, that wintry mix just petering out, so it does become drier by the time we get to friday morning. but we�*re likely to have a widespread frost and that�*s going to lead to some icy conditions as well as that covering of snow. things are drying off because we�*re seeing this little ridge of high pressure building in from the south—west. the winds are going to be light across many parts of the country. so we�*re going to be left with probably a lot of cloud around. and there may well be some quite low cloud and some fog which will be slow to lift. probably the best of the sunshine towards north—eastern parts of scotland, probably improving, though, towards the south—west as well. temperatures here lower than they�*ve been over the past 2a hours. and for many parts of the country, it�*s going to be another chilly day. we�*ve got a weather front sweeping across the country early into the weekend and then behind that, we get more of a north—westerly airflow, so for a while, early on saturday, we�*ve got a spell of rain, maybe some snow over the hills. it�*s soon replaced by sunshine and the rest of the weekend

should be sunny but it�*s still going to be rather blustery. and social groups.

this is bbc news. our top stories: president trump is impeached for a second time. he�*s formally charged with inciting insurrection after last week�*s mob violence on the capitol building. he must go. he is a clear and present danger to the nation that we all love. italy�*s new political crisis — former prime minister, matteo renzi, pulls his party out of the governing coalition — in a row over pandemic funding. and hollywood hammered — the pandemic�*s sent profits plummeting to a forty year low.