this is bbc news. we will have the headlines and all the main news stories for you at the top of the hours straight after this programme. this week — how virtual reality could transform the future of surgery. can california create a safe space for whistle—blowers here in the present? and how to rebuild the past, piece by piece by piece. on this programme, we see a lot of really useful technology, but some things are just solutions looking for problems.

yeah, like... clears throat. ..vr. what was that you were smelling, by the way? the rainforest, obviously! of course! we've lost count of the number of virtual reality experiences we've had over the past few years, some feeling more useful than others. the first obvious place for vr was gaming, but once the technology had proved that it was properly immersive, we started to see signs that it really could take us to real places. it could put us in all sorts of situations, including education and even medicine. and sometimes, technology turns out to be most useful where you least expect it. i've seen vr used to help people overcome phobias. you've seen it used to teach students how to do surgery. but this has to be the most powerful use of vr i have ever seen. six—month—old archie was born with sagittal synostosis. you are a happy boy,

aren't you? a condition where a baby's growth lines in the skull fuse too early. this means as the brain grows, the skull can't grow sideways to accommodate it, so it expands front and back, distorting the head shape. oh, that was nice! while it is not life—threatening, it leaves parents like amanda and judd faced with a difficult decision as to whether they opt for the risks of surgery or let nature take its course, with the physical and psychological impacts that follow. it's been quite overwhelming, hasn't it? like, there's been a lot of appointments and a lot of time away. so, when offered the chance to be the first to use a groundbreaking new ai platform that predicts the outcome of the operation in virtual reality, theyjumped at the chance.

you are able to see your own child's condition or your own child's heart or head projected into this virtual environment, with a full feeling of what will happen in terms of the treatment to your own child. i've come here to great ormond street hospital tojoin the family for their consultation where, for the first time, they're going to get to see the virtual reality. you're about to see now what will hopefully be the final result. how are you feeling? excited. and obviously, there is always that worry about what he is going to have done. archie babbles. and that's what he thinks of it! you will be placed in - an immersive world and you're going to be able to| interact with things using the controllers. so here is archie's skull as it stands now that we have done the reconstruction using the ct scan. and as you can see, this as the side view. we've got the forehead here, the back of the head here,

and these lines are the sutures — the ones that are working still, the growth lines. so the way we do the surgery is we make a small window in the bone here. the algorithms needed to create these images have been made possible by the harnessing of data from 60 operations over the course of the last seven years. so here, the grey is the head shape as it's now, the green is the predicted head shape, so the first change that you can see is that the back of his head which, at the moment is sloping down, is pushed up a little and there's a more regular curvature to it. this immersive experience allows the parents to see from all angles a truly personalised picture of exactly how archie's head can be reshaped with surgery.

would you like us to suggest anything about the head shape that you would like to see done differently? no, i think it's the back of the head that we are noticing the most. indeed, and that you should see within a week or two of surgery... wow, 0k. ..you can see the back going in. if parents feel that the shaping could be improved, like the back of the head being made broader than the images, then adjustments can be made — as long as the surgeon supports their view, of course. it's a lot to think about. it is. it's hard to put words to it but as well as it's a lot to take in, it is reassuring, knowing that that's what we've got to expect and, yeah, and have that explained and we're not going to sort of be waiting and wondering what's happening. how much of a difference did it make, being able to see this in vr instead of itjust being explained or looking at a 2d image? it does make a big difference, doesn't it? because, to be honest,

looking at him, i did not realise sort of the size of the forehead and things like that, that it was going to make a difference, so being able to see the whole head and the different angles and everything, it was — it was quite nice to see, wasn't it, so... this was a big day for amanda and judd but also a big day for you — this is the first time that you've shown your technology here in action. how are you feeling about it? i was slightly apprehensive because we are giving them a lot more information and the question was will that — well, it will be beneficial, but will it be too much for them? and i was delighted to see how they took to it. it was their first experience with vr and they seemed to enjoy the experience and certainly gained a lot from it, so delighted, really delighted.

it seemed to boost their confidence. indeed, indeed — which is what we are hoping to achieve. they had a clearer idea of what the future holds and now, when they sign the consent form, it's what i would call truly informed consent. and, having confirmed their decision to go ahead, within a few weeks, the big day arrived. the theatre is just being prepared as, in a few minutes, archie is coming into his surgery where a spring like this is going to be inserted into his skull through a small cut. it will immediately expand and start to change the shape of his head, and then continue to do so over the next four weeks. at that point, it can be removed. invented by doctorjeelani 13 years ago, this technique has reduced operation time from three hours to a0 minutes, cut blood transfusions by 90% and provides more predictable outcomes. 0k, spring engaged. and it's that predictability that's made the data usable for visualisations with 90% accuracy. and today, we've used handheld

scanner to capture the surface of the head of the baby before and after the procedure. we will overlap the images from the surface scans and compare the shape difference, and we use some modelling to try and understand what happens over time. so we have just finished. the surgery's gone really well. the springs are in, we've seen an expansion on the table and we should meet our predictions over the next weeks. what we've seen here is being created for one particular condition, but it could be applied to many different types of surgery in the future. what we have shown here is essentially proof of principle — that if you take a condition, an art form, make it granular enough that you can study it and put it on engineering and ai platforms, then you can actually predict the future with a reasonable degree of accuracy. what i would like to see as a surgeon in ten, perhaps 20 years' time, is that most surgeries — most surgical practice is done this way, where the control and power is very much given to the parents and the patients.

two weeks on from surgery and we visited archie and his family. we're quite relieved that we are over the other side now. archie's doing really well. so we've been told that obviously now he's had it done, there shouldn't be any concerns with development and things, so we're really with how it went. but having the opportunity of doing the vr really, really sort of reassured us that we were doing the right thing. i know that was something that did cross our mind at first, but being able to actually see the before and after was quite a relief of that it lifted of that pressure, wasn't it? it lifted that weight off our shoulders so, yeah, we're happy. wow, thatjust seems so incredibly hard for everyone involved. the family were amazing. i think they were so keen to raise awareness for the condition that they were happy for us to follow theirjourney, despite the fact it really was quite intimate.

yeah, absolutely. did you get any kind of sense of how much being able to see those images in vr helped the family to make the decision? yes, i think they were already pretty confident that they were going to go ahead with the operation, but you could just tell that it provided them with that extra bit of reassurance that they felt they were making the right decision. and they knew what to expect from the surgery and in the weeks that followed, and that really may have given them a little bit more confidence along the way. yeah, absolutely. well, thank you for telling that story and archie, and your family, lots of love, best wishes from us. hello and welcome to the week in tech. it was the week the fbi is investigating thousands of fake e—mails sent from one of its own servers. star trek: discovery fans will now only be able to discover season four if they live in canada or the us after netflix loses streaming rights to paramount days before release. and video sharing site youtube announced plans to make dislike numbers private.

apple will soon — finally — let users repair their own phones, selling the tools and parts available for some of the common fixes. yes, those of us with the inclination, time and knowledge can purchase the manual and parts to fix things like screen and battery replacements in the iphone i2 and 13. it plans to offer the service in the us from next year, before a global rollout. though let me tell you from experience, it's not for the faint hearted. balloon robots with soft insides are now a possibility, thanks to a new way of making soft actuators — those are the bits that make things move. scientists at princeton university use bubble casting to create soft robots, such as this star—shaped one, that can perform delicate tasks like picking up a blueberry. and finally, here's dog phone — the toys pets can use to video call their owners. to help with separation anxiety, the internal accelerometer inside this toy allows your canine companion to simply move the ball to start the call, and can even answer incoming calls by moving the ball again to receive.

that's obviously been thought up in a lab! i think it's fair to say that facebook has had a big few weeks. mostly that is down to frances haugen blowing the whistle on her former employers by leaking thousands of internal documents. �*the facebook files�*, as they are now known, reveal the inner workings of the company, and james clayton has been wondering whether her testimony, along with a new california law, may inspire others to come forward, too. people like frances haugen are a rare thing in silicon valley. the decision she made to take on facebook wasn't ta ken lightly. the company intentionally hides vital information from the public, from the us government and from governments around the world. silicon valley is a notoriously secretive and notoriously litigious place when it comes to employees who want to put their head above the parapet to raise concerns.

how did big tech get so big? and one of the reasons it got so big, to be honest, is by exploiting thousands of people who work there. and the way that they have managed to keep that exploitation going is by silencing people who work there, including through incredibly wide and broad non—disclosure agreements. i've honestly almost never seen anything like it. i'm a kinda of human rights lawyer who used to bring cases against the cia, and the culture of secrecy and fear at big tech is basically as bad as i used to see in the cia. it means whistle—blowers who want to come forward, like haugen, need to be extremely brave and have extremely deep pockets. non—disclosure and non—disparagement agreements have often been used here in silicon valley to try and silence employees — take the notorious case of theranos, for example. behind me are what used to be theranos' very plush and very expensive offices.

the company claimed it could diagnose hundreds of diseases with just a few drops of blood. the problem was that that idea was a fantasy. it didn't work. every person should have the ability to get that type of test. elizabeth holmes, its founder, raised hundreds of millions of dollars from investors and for years, no—one knew that the technology didn't work — even major investors were in the dark. it took whistle—blowers to come forward to expose the truth here, but they were met with a huge amount of legal pressure. now, a new law in california aims to re—tip the balance away from companies using ndas to silence employees. the silenced no more act was passed into california law last month and it essentially dilutes the power of ndas. workers will have more protections to bring up things like harassment and discrimination.

it's a huge win for whistle—blowers. cher scarlett used to work at apple. she filed complaints against the company about equal pay and then aired some of her grievances publicly. when we work at these huge companies that have, you know, not only, you know, big, huge external law firms but they also have lawyers in house, that's very intimidating, you know? i go in, you know, seek a lawyer and i'm looking up and it's like $500 an hour. like, that's, you know, like five times what i make. there's no way i can afford it and i certainly don't understand all this legal jargon, so most people just give up. like, it's very intimidating and scary. she believes the new law is a game changer. i think that more people will start speaking out because of this, because there will be that plain language there that says you're allowed to talk about these things and they won't be so worried

that, you know, a lawyer can come after them and take everything from them or that they won't be able to work again, you know, because they violated some, you know, or they breached some agreement in their contract. they're going to see that they're allowed to talk about that, and they're going to. the law in california comes into force in january and scarlett is lobbying to replicate it in her home state of washington. things are changing in america's tech sector. farfrom frances haugen being an outlier, she may well have inspired others to do the same. big tech has many problems and the best disinfectant, as they say, is light. welcome to 0lympia, in greece, as you've never seen it before — unless you're 2,000 years old, that is. the greek government has recently done a deal with microsoft to recreate

the ancient amphitheatres and temples in augmented reality, so visitors can feel what the place was like in a time of great warriors, thinkers, athletes and architects. experts and archaeologists used cameras and drones to scan the entire site in 3d, capturing as much detail as possible in both the buildings and the artefacts, and visitors can enjoy the results in ar on their phones. among the 27 monuments that they can see are the original 0lympic stadiums, the temples of zeus and hera, and the workshop of the renowned sculptor phidias — all of which have weathered thousands of years of war, erosion and earthquakes and which now have been digitally refurbished. the technology is definitely changing the way visitors explore historical and archaeological sites. it opens up a different way of experiencing our cultural

heritage. actually, besides the 3d, the digital representation of the monument, it can — it has the potential to demonstrate, to showcase aspects of life in ancient societies. as part of the same project, visitors to the olympic museum in athens can use a hololens headset to see a miniature version of the site, and it's hoped that this form of digital archiving will continue to offer a portal to another era, helping us to feel part of history, to understand what humanity has achieved in the past, and possibly showing us what we're still capable of today. speaking of which, let's hop from greece to italy, to another ancient treasure, wherejen copestake has been sifting through the rubble. the lost city of pompeii was destroyed by an eruption of mount vesuvius in the first century. while a lot of the site

was remarkably preserved, many details of life here were lost, including some of the colourful frescoes of the buildings. above the main site is the cacina rustica, a storage place for thousands of fragments of two frescoes destroyed in the initial eruption and damaged further by bombing in world war ii. how many pieces do you think are here? i think here we've get 10,000 pieces of fragments at the moment. this is only a little part because in other storerooms we have more and more in a box that never studied before. the fragments come in all sorts of sizes, from tiny bits of rubble to big pieces. so no—one knows exactly how these frescoes look like. there are lots of missing pieces. it's not like an ordinary puzzle. there will be a lot of holes in this fresco. these are three—dimensional pieces which are flat on one side. 0n the flat side, there is usually some decoration, some colour, and there is a kind of a three—dimensional structure, and these pieces do not match exactly,

so it's a very difficult and challenging problem. the puzzle has remained unsolved for decades, and now, a team led by ca' foscari university of venice, will create a robotic system to analyse and eventually piece together the frescoes. called repair, or reconstructing the past: artificial intelligence and robotics meet cultural heritage, it's the first time machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques will be used to take on a project of this scale. the robot is scanning a piece of fresco using polarised lenses and so, at the end of the process, the piece will be scanned in 3d.

with the same infrastructure and the same type of technology, we can also scan the same piece using hyperspectral sensors that are able to collect information that the human eyes cannot see. this information includes the residual colours of pigments used by the romans which cannot be seen with the naked eye. what we can see here is basically, the light coming from our object at different wavelengths. we can select the wavelength that we want to look at, and this amount gave us initial information of our material of our sample. different points on the objects can be selected to examine closely, with information given about similarities and differences between pixels in the image. once all of the information is collected, an algorithm will suggest how it thinks the pieces fit together and what's missing, and run it past a human expert. there is going to be a kind of human in the loop process. so imagine what happens —

the system will propose a guess and then some expert will look at the proposal and might say, "look, this area is wrong" so it can provide negative feedback. if this works, i think it will have a huge potential in future projects, both in pompeii and elsewhere, for not only wall paintings but also pottery fragments, which is the majority of finds during most excavations. and there is a huge potential in reconstructing and, yeah, analysing these finds. the final piece of the puzzle is a robot that will be built to be able to handle and reconstruct the frescoes using soft hands. the robot will pick up with its hands all the fragments, grasping every single pieces, and i think this kind of robotic colleague is like — maybe internet before 19 years.

yes! now it's new and i hope it will be very usual and common for us in the future to have this kind of help. how interesting was that? absolutely. that wasjen in pompeii, would you believe? unfortunately, though, that is it from us for this week. 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. we'll see you soon. bye— bye. hello there. later this week, not only is there potential for some more disruptive weather heading our way, but something much colder, as well. wednesday starts off

on a chilly note with a bit of frost in places, but some mist and dense fog patches possible across parts of england and wales — the winds have been lightest through the night. a bit more of a breeze through scotland and northern ireland to get under way, and some wet weather for the morning rush hour — this weather front here, a cold front, will bring the first run of colder air further and further southwards as we go through the next 2a hours. in the southern half of the country, a bit of a chill, temperatures not rising much — we still have light winds and a relatively quiet day, lots of mist and fog around. the morning rain, though, across scotland and northern ireland is replaced by sunshine and scattered showers, some heavy with hail, turning wintry in the far north of scotland, particularly on the hills. but turning wetter later on, northwest england, north and west wales as that cold front slowly makes its way southwards and eastwards. a little bit of patchy rain and drizzle to the south and east, we'll see some wetter conditions here through wednesday night.

at the same time, very windy through wednesday night into thursday, and the far north of scotland seeing gusts of wind 50—60 mph — and that'll bring colder air, a very cold thursday morning commute, but a bright, crisp one for many — really good visibility, sunshine for the most part. some showers around the western and eastern coasts, but most of the showers will be in the north of scotland, where snow could even come down to sea level later, and an added wind—chill to go with what will be a cool day. and then things turn much more disturbed — through thursday into friday, particularly friday night and saturday, this area of low pressure transferring its way southwards. cold air wrapped around it, which means a greater chance of things turning to snow for some, but it's the winds which could be the key feature. even on friday, the winds really starting to pick up — outbreaks of rain initially pushing southwards and eastwards, but the showers that follow in its wake will turn increasingly wintry — over the hills for many, but even to lower levels in the northern half of scotland, and it will be a cold day. but through friday night into saturday, as our low pressure transfers its way southwards, we could see gales, if not severe gales develop along that weather system, working its way south and, as i said, there could be a bit of snow mixed in, too.

and that will take us into saturday, as well. now those strong winds could be a problem in some parts, we could see damaging gusts of wind, some travel disruption around to take us into the weekend. even if you don't see those damaging winds — widespread gales and, as i said, that risk of rain and snow, too. see you soon.

welcome to bbc news. i'm david eades. our top stories: 100 days of the taliban — and afghanistan's humanitarian misery deepens by the day. we have a special report. the 50 million barrel gamble. joe biden releases huge reserves of us oil as he seeks to bring down soaring energy and gasoline prices. so today i'm announcing that the largest ever release from the largest ever release from the us strategic petroleum reserve to help provide the supply we need as we recover from this pandemic. the man accused of driving a car into a christmas parade in wisconsin, killing six, appears in court to face murder charges. and a one yearjourney covering seven million miles. nasa launches a spacecraft on a test mission to save the earth — and destroy itself.