inside kabul airport and are ready to take control as soon as the americans leave. sources have told the bbc that us and british troops are wrapping up their operations there. the pentagon says there are still credible threats against the airport. a us intelligence report has concluded that covid—19 was not developed as a biological weapon by china. but officials were unable to provide a more definitive explanation for its origin, and blamed beijing for hindering the global investigation. manchester united have reached an agreement to re—sign cristiano ronaldo from juventus. the portugal star striker left the club for real madrid in 2009. the 36—year—old has won more than 30 major trophies. plans to ban single—use

plastic plates, cutlery, and polystyrene cups in england have just been announced, as part of proposals to tackle what ministers say is "the unnecessary use of plastics that wreak havoc with our natural environment." the measures will be considered in a public consultation this autumn, with scotland, wales and northern ireland having similar plans. here's our political correspondent, nick eardley. this is our bamboo set... is this the future of eating on the go? paris sells bamboo cutlery across the uk. we are still working with bamboo and hemp. sustainable items which he hopes are part of the answer to reducing plastic consumption. what do you think about the idea of banning plastic cutlery? yeah, i would vote for anybody who will ban it. i think plastic is everywhere. we cannot get rid of plastic completely, but there are definitely certain areas where we can improve. this is the problem — plastic in oceans around the world, deadly for

a number of species. campaigners have been urging the government to act. the reality is that we are really facing an environmental crisis. 0ur oceans are full of plastic and they are killing marine life and damaging our ecosystem. banning these items is going to contribute to stopping plastic pollution. we need the government to go much, much further. we are facing a plastics crisis and we need to turn off the tap. and this is what ministers want to ban, single—use plastic cutlery and plates. it's all part of a strategy from the government to try and get rid of what it calls avoidable plastic waste by 2042, but so far anyway there is no mention of things like this, plastic coffee cups, and some want ministers to go further. there will now be a consultation, but it could be another 18 months before a ban becomes law. friends of the earth say faster, more radical action is needed. we need government to take

an overall approach, to say that what we are going to do is bring an end to all plastic pollution and what we are going to do is drastically reduce the amount of all single—use products, notjust a fork followed by a spoon followed by a cup. we are trying to be sustainable... paris hopes increased awareness and reduced cost will make alternatives to plastic more popular. if we came to your house for dinner, we'd all be eating with bamboo cutlery? i will give you bamboo cutlery — no plastic in my house. nick eardley, bbc news. now on bbc news — click. this week: redesigning aeroplanes... ..the passenger pods hurtling people through tunnels... yes! yeah! woo! ..and fancy a flying car?

coventry was once the heart of british automotive manufacturing, dubbed britain's motor city. but it's moved with the times. now hosting the institute for future transport and cities at coventry university, playing an important part in the future of autonomous, sustainable and connected transport. and in a city where the first ever british car was manufactured, research has moved to the next evolution of the automobile — the autonomous vehicle. for a few years now, we've been told that driverless cars are just around the corner. and on this programme, we've taken a few for a spin. but before they can truly

become a reality, we need to know that we can trust them just as much, if not more, than a human driver. and if this driverless world comes about, it will be transformative — not just for the drivers, but also for the cities, so we may need to rethink some of the basics. we're used to a lot of congestion on our roads, but it seems here, like this model of autonomous vehicles, seems to actually overcome some of that congestion. so we know that people spend a lot of time driving around cities, creating congestion, looking for a parking space. with fully autonomous parking, you need fewer spaces. so that will reduce the requirement in infrastructure and in cities for the real estate needed for parking solutions. the vehicle will literally drive itself into a car park, find its spot, recognise the white lines and pull in and park itself. clearly, the technology has come a long way, but before our streets can be

filled with autonomous vehicles, the companies need to figure out how to train them and we as a society need to be confident with the rules and the choices that we allow them to make. zoe kleinman�*s been finding out more. this is what we were promised. i took a ride in this truly driverless car from russia around the streets of las vegas last year. it was both terrifying and weirdly underwhelming. turns out the car was a much more sensible driver than most humans i know. it took me three attempts to pass my driving test — none of it was my fault, obviously! but perhaps i should have come here to cambridge, where the tech firm five has developed a sort of driving school for driverless cars. five runs endless simulations to ensure that driverless car tech responds safely to challenges on the roads. one small scenario has nearly 500,000 possible variations. like me, our virtual car does not pass every test first time

in the simulation. any driver will tell you it's those unusual moments on the road that you weren't expecting that pose the most danger. a kangaroo runs out in front of you. what? it's happened! it prompted the firm drisk to created the world's largest virtual library of edge cases. we are creating the first true driving test for autonomous vehicles, and the idea behind it is when autonomous vehicles are arriving in the uk, how will the government know that they are safe for uk streets? but getting the data to build the library hasn't been easy because people don't tend to report near misses. we've had stories of people driving around roundabouts and seeing somebody take the wrong turn and driving along the motorway the wrong way. 0ne individual described an experience of having sheep appearing from nowhere as they were turning around a corner. this driverless car is like a bit of a hive mind.

there is a fleet of them currently driving around london, clocking up hours and hours and hours of experience, which they then all use in order to make them better drivers. london—based wayve doesn't actually make its own cars. instead, it builds the brains for others. we're not going to get there by taking technology from one or two decades ago and trying to commercialise it with brute force and billions of dollars of capital. things like machine learning — this is the technology that is going to power the future. wayve�*s idea is that its cars record theirjourneys, share their data with a central hq and the useful bits feed into its learning and then back out to all of the vehicles with its brains in their boots. try having a go at the moral machine — a game set up by mit scientists to explore how humans think driverless cars should react in various scenarios. warning — they're all horrible. oh, this isjust awful!

you saw examples where people were willing to sacrifice poorer people to save richer people, or heavier people to save more athletic people. what i would consider to be immoral, yeah. fortunately, none of us is in charge of deciding who cars should kill, but that's not what's holding them back. when we think of self—driving cars, it's easy to forget quite how much we as humans actually do when we're driving, so the future of autonomous vehicles not only relies on navigating difficult roads, but also reacting to new situations, and now potentially passing a government driving test. and i don't know many humans who pass their test first time. zoe there. now, when it comes to the future of transport, sustainability is key — and that's notjust on the ground. up in the skies, the race is on to decarbonise aviation. companies are looking at different ways to be able to make air travel more

environmentally friendly. and marc cieslak�*s been looking at some of the more dramatic solutions. here's the problem. the environment. we as a species are negatively impacting it in lots of different ways. aviation contributes to just over 2% of global emissions. pre—pandemic, the number was predicted to rise fast. the problem with aeroplanes are those. and the fuel that they run on pollutes the environment when it's made and when it's used, so engineers, scientists and aerospace companies are looking at ways of cleaning up the stuff that comes out of those.

if we're going to allow people to keep on travelling, then we're going to have to make aircraft which are far more efficient. and so there will be a real pressure to develop technologies, new shapes of aircraft, new propulsion systems that fundamentally reduce the fuel burn of aircraft. here at the university of cambridge�*s whittle laboratory, they specialise in work relating to turbomachinery. there are several projects and technologies being developed here that are considering sustainability and new methods of powering aircraft. there's a wide variety of different projects under way encompassing different kinds of aircraft, from new engines and components for big commercial airliners to projects like this one — testing out the efficiency of distributing lots of electrically powered propellers across an aircraft's wing. so one of the advantages of electric propulsion is that rather than having one or two largejet engines, you could have many smaller electric motors powering

the aircraft and they have a very similar efficiency, whether they are very small or very large, so we might see aircraft with maybe a dozen propellers in front of them and that allows us to design smaller wings and more efficient wings. solutions like this have potential for smaller, lower—range aircraft, but for bigger aeroplanes with longer range, the look and design of the outside and inside of these airliners that we're all familiar with could change, leading us to designs like this one — the blended wing. concepts like this offer big advantages in terms of saving fuel due to the aircraft's shape, generating large amounts of lift. they also reduce noise as a result of the engines being mounted above the wing. and more recently, there are blended wing concepts exploring hydrogen as a fuel source that produces zero harmful emissions. but these radical designs, like the blended wing, come with their own issues.

the technology is very important, but it's getting the infrastructure to go with that technology which would radically change on the airport level as well. it would change the fuel that implies an entire infrastructure to bring that fuel into the airport as well. they'll also do away with windows for passengers. the wing blending into the cabin means you just can't have them. instead, there's a suggestion that passengers will have virtual screens, which should make up for the lack of a real view. well, that's where hybrid technologies come in — aircraft which look like a conventional airliner with gas turbine engines on the wings, but with an additional electric fan behind the tail. this is a concept known as boundary layer ingestion. now, boundary layer ingestion

is a technology which is aimed at taking the flow that forms over the surface of an aircraft, the flow that's on the surface is what usually forms the wake behind an aircraft and causes the drag. the idea we have is to have a fan that's wrapped around the back of the fuselage and so itjust ingests all of this parasitic flow at the back of the aircraft and takes that in and re—energises it and turns it into useful thrust. time is the enemy here, though. aerospace is traditionally a very conservative industry. can a significant amount of research and development occur in time to address the world's urgent climate issues? so if we're going to decarbonise aviation by 2050, then we need to get down to 1980s levels of emissions by 2030. so if you're looking at radically new concepts,

you need to be able to work in a hardware—rich environment, you need to be able to build and test a lot of things, because many of those ideas are going to fail. here in bedfordshire, blue bear systems specialise in building uavs for commercial and military use. they're leading a consortium, including engineers from cambridge, in designing a propulsion system for a small, zero emissions aircraft. the project, called inception, is part funded by the uk government. blue bear are now testing using flying scale drones. this is going to produce a full—size working project in two years. but hopefully by 2030, there will be electric aircraft which people can pay to buy a ticket and fly around on. in the future, commercial aircraft will undoubtedly be more environmentally friendly. but we as individuals will also need to address the impact of and the amount of

flying that we all make. for many, many years there have been four modes of transportation moving humans around the globe — planes, trains, automobiles and boats. but now there might be another one coming into the mix. 0utside las vegas in the desert of nevada is the virgin hyperloop. this is a pod—based travel system that the company hopes will be the future of mass transit. the idea for this kind of travel was proposed in 2013 by tesla and spacex boss elon musk. the idea is quite simple — put people in a pod, put that pod in a tube, and shoot that pod down the tube at the speed of an aircraft. and that is exactly what the virgin hyperloop is working on making reality. it goes directly to your destination, doesn't stop at every place along the way, it does that electrically, autonomously and does it inside of a tube. click visited this spot

in 2016, and frankly there wasn't much of anything to look at. itjust sounds so radical, so groundbreaking, it's hard to imagine it ever happening. in the few years since they have come quite a long way. and in november of last year they successfully completed their first passenger test. they travelled 500 metres in 15 seconds, going as fast as 107mph. yes, yes! josh was on board for the maiden voyage. it was absolutely incredible, it was surreal to be sitting inside of a hyperloop and the ride itself, you felt a little bit of acceleration, sort of like you would have in a sports car. so this is just a beta version of the pod. the final one is expected to be a lot bigger, think the size of a bus, but also a lot easier to get into. the full—size pod is expected to fit around 25 people,

but more importantly than that, it's going to house all of the tech that makes this hyperloop system work. now that's important because if something breaks or goes wrong, all they have to do is remove the pod and fix it somewhere else, instead of going into the tube and potentially disrupting a lot of travel. one of the key components of hyperloop travel is the ability to go really, really fast. so they designed a way for the pods to levitate using opposing magnets, which in theory will help it go as fast as an aeroplane. the pods will travel in tubes about this size, and should be able to reach speeds of up to 670mph. that is fast enough to get you from london to paris in under half an hour. the system of tubes can be built on land, over water or underground — and maybe, just maybe one day, across oceans. but building an entirely new infrastructure across a city or country will take a lot of work, and a lot of money. but virgin's hyperloop system isn't the only

one being developed. underneath the streets of las vegas is another hyperloop tunnel, this one by the boring company — yes, the one owned by elon musk. his system will essentially be an underground motorway. old tv shows and movies may have led us to believe the future of transportation will include flying cars, but maybe the modern day version of that is actually a pod flying through a tube. that was cody. now, electric vehicles are becoming commonplace on many roads. but the problem is you've got to charge them, and it's not always as simple as we'd like it to be. so how about putting down the lead and opting for a spot of wireless charging, courtesy of the road? just think of it as being like putting your mobile phone on a wireless charger. the aim of this taxi isn't to be fully recharged, butjust to get a bit of a boost while it's waiting at a taxi rank without any passengers. but maybe we are missing something here.

why worry about recharging the batteries, when we could just be swapping them? stephen beckett has been to taiwan to look at some other ways electric vehicles could be powered. this is taipei's famous, or perhaps infamous, "scooter waterfall". it is one of the main routes into central taipei for thousands of commuters every way. for thousands of commuters every day. it is mind—boggling how many mopeds there are here. thousands of them, and theyjust keep on coming. and you know what, you really get a sense ofjust how much pollution these guys are probably causing. this is the same spot a few weeks later, and believe it or not, a good chunk of those bikes aren't producing any pollution at all. this is a publicity stunt for gogoro, a taiwanese start—up pioneering the use of electric scooters in taiwan. everybody is moving into cities and living on top of each other, and the need for adopting electric

transportation as a cleaner mode of transportation. but here comes the problem — chicken and egg. without the proper infrastructure nobody will ever adopt a mobility solution that is electric because charging in these big cities are next to impossible. and this is gogoro's solution to that problem. riders own special electric bikes, but not the batteries inside them. instead when they are running low on power they visit a station like this to swap out their flat battery and pick up a fully charged one. a subscription of around $10—30 a month gives you access to any of the 11100 swap stations around taiwan. gogoro estimate their customers have saved around 80,000 tons of c02 between them, that's roughly 25,000 across the world flights. over in san francisco, one company has a different take on the battery swapping business. these are drive—in swapping stations from startup ample. you just park up and within minutes a series of robots remove the empty batteries from your vehicle and swap

in fresh ones. it is an idea that is also being championed by chinese electric vehicle maker nio. they plan to build 500 stations across china this year. at the moment ample�*s system can swap batteries into compatible electric vehicles in under ten minutes. by the end of the year they say that will be down to just five. quite a big difference from the hours it can take to fully charge an installed battery. each charging bay is about the size of a couple of parking spaces. at the moment there are five in and around san francisco with plans for more soon. cities is a very tough problem. the grids are not set up to deliver a tremendous amount of charge, and so putting fast chargers can be a challenge. one thing we do is, because we can actually have the ability to slow charge the batteries and choose when we charge it. because you separate charging batteries from putting them into the car, we can actually use renewable energy. the hope is the idea could initially be a hit with ride sharing and last—minute delivery fleets

who need to recharge quickly and get back on the road. if you are a ride sharing driver you might spend 10—12 hours a week at a charging station waiting for your car to charge and earning a lot less money. whether or not ample can convince owners and vehicle manufacturers to adopt their tech, battery swapping like this could play a key role in addressing some of the issues hampering the uptake of electric vehicles. but we can't talk about the future of transport without mentioning flying cars. the question is, are they ready to take off yet? nick kwek�*s been finding out. over the years we have seen passenger drone demos, hoverboards and jetwings. 0ne manufacturer from the netherlands, though, thinks it has finally cracked it — well, almost. here it is, the pal—v liberty, on british soil. shall we take it for a spin? let's go.

sadly, this precise model in the uk is unable to fly. it's had its parts decommissioned. but across the north sea i am assured it does this. like you find in most aircraft, you have the throttle here to control the power to the engines, the joystick between my leg which controls directions, so left or right or forward or back, and the pedals which were used for driving now control the rudderfor yaw. it can carry enough fuel to fly for up to three hours. of course, on the aviation frontier, safety is a work in progress. german outfit lilium's all—electric prototype went up in flames last year, around a month after another jet from an israeli start—up eviation caught fire during testing. meanwhile, boeing has pressed pause on its innovation

unit, next. backed by uber and toyota, joby aviation plans on bringing a flying taxi service to our airways. 0ther established car companies are piling in too. general motors has unveiled a flying cadillac concept and with funding from innovate uk and hyundai, coventry is set to receive a pop—up airport for the flying vehicles of tomorrow. but time is of the essence. pal—v has been going for two decades, but last summer received road certification, one of the very few in the world to do so. it is now working on air certification and it's promising customers keys as early as next year. similar solutions are being touted by its rivals, or as pal—v sees them, welcome competition. that is it for our future of transport special. as ever, you can keep up with the team on social media, find us on youtube, instagram, facebook and twitter at @bbcclick. thanks for watching and we will be back next week. bye— bye.

hello. the weather on the last weekend of august last year didn't cover itself in glory — a high ofjust 16 throughout the weekend in edinburgh, in birmingham and manchester. it is going to be warmer this weekend, at least to start with. it's going to be dry throughout the weekend with this area of high pressure that's going to last into next week as well, although as the weekend goes on, there will be more cloud and breeze, so it will start to feel a bit cooler once again. and actually quite chilly as the weekend begins in rural spots, with temperatures into single figures. but in the sunshine, we're all going to warm up really quite nicely

as the day goes on. there will be some areas of cloud in north—west scotland, some patches of cloud in eastern scotland and in england, though a lot of this will start to break up to allow some sunshine to come through, increasingly so in the afternoon. 0n the breeze, it's quite stiff in east anglia and south—east england. a stray shower can't be ruled out, and the breeze pushing into north sea coasts will keep temperatures right along the coast close to16, 17 degrees. but for many, it's low 20s, and up to 23 in glasgow, so very pleasantly warm in some of that sunshine. and it will stay dry through saturday night, but notice how the cloud is increasing into scotland, north—east england and into northern ireland. here, temperatures will be hotting up compared with the night before. so, as we start sunday, there will be more cloud across scotland, northern ireland, north—east england, pushing in across more of eastern england during the day. the lion's share of sunday's sunny spells will be in wales, parts of the midlands and southern england. and this is where the temperatures will be highest.

whereas elsewhere, it will feel a bit cooler and the breeze is starting to pick up more widely as well, coming in from the north—east. as this area of high pressure just backs a little bit more towards the north—west of us, allowing more of us to feel that east or north—easterly breeze going through monday and into the week ahead. it may be a bank holiday where you are, there will be a lot of cloud around on monday, so only limited sunny spells. so you'll notice by then the temperatures have come down a few degrees. just towards the south—west of the uk, where we'll see most of the sunshine, breaking into the 20s. so, it will feel cooler next week. there will be a lot of cloud around, just occasional sunny spells coming through. and it's still dry, with that high pressure in control as we get into september.

this is bbc news. i'm rich preston. our top stories: the taliban say they're ready to take control of kabul airport as soon as american forces leave. it's thought us & uk troops could end their operations there within hours. the door is closing — and closing loudly, but other windows are going to open. but will they be open enough? the us embassy renews its advice against travelling to kabul airport as the death toll from thursday's suicide bombing climbs to 170. also on the programme, us intelligence agencies say covid—19 was not developed as a biological weapon, but remain split on its origins. the man convicted of the assassination of senator robert f kennedy is recommended for parole after serving 53 years injail.