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tv   Click  BBC News  March 26, 2023 12:30pm-1:00pm BST

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this is bbc news. the headlines: security officials in ukraine have accused russia of depriving belarus of its sovereignty. it comes after russia's president, vladimir putin, announced that his country would station nuclear weapons there. president biden has ordered that federal aid be sent to mississippi, as emergency services work to help
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hundreds of people who've been left homeless by a tornado. at least 25 people have died in mississippi, with one person killed in alabama. voters in berlin are to decide whether germany's capital should be carbon—neutral by 2030. it comes after a year of campaigning, but critics say the timeframe is unrealistic. donald trump has launched his campaign to return to the white house, with a rally for supporters in the state of texas. he used the platform to attack those who are seeking to put him behind bars. you're watching bbc news. now it's time for click.
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this week, get ready for blast—off. we're filming a hot—fire rocket test in super—slo—mo, and it will blow you away. whoo! that went right through me! how do you choose your perfect shade? we've got an app to help you build your foundations. and shiona goes for a walk on the wild side. but you never know what's round the next corner. we've discovered something like 20,000 new paths in the short time we've been running the project already. have you ever wondered what happens when a satellite goes wrong? how would you know what was up? how would you find out if it had been sabotaged? well, that's what i've come to texas to find out. 30 seconds. we're at this 200—acre site to film a hot—fire test of a rocket engine.
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when it first starts up, it's going to be relatively thin. we'll actually see some shockwaves. oh, wow. and we're going to do it in a way that even the rocket makers themselves haven't done before. four, three, two, one. in 2022, firefly aerospace became one ofjust a few us companies that have successfully put things into orbit. cheering look at that view! the company has also won contracts from nasa to build a lunar lander that will deliver payloads to the moon in 2024 and 2026, and put a satellite into lunar orbit. but it's the bit between launching from the earth
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and landing on the moon that's piqued my interest. we also want to build an orbiting spacecraft that has the ability to be on call for our customers. you can literally go to a web browser and say, "i have an asset in space and it's in distress, "i'd like a camera shot of it, or it needs to de—orbit. "firefly, can you do that?" well, we can. ultimately, that'll be a constellation of 30, 40, 50 of those spacecraft that are dispersed in the different regions of space. and they're on call, available for customers to say, "hey, go over there, i have trouble..." "i need a pizza on the iss." yeah, we haven't really thought about the oven system of how we might keep the pizza warm, but we could do that. well, i've seen the oven, it's strapped to the back. it's a little bigger. yeah, it's a little bigger. now, look, this is a pretty big deal.
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everything that's in orbit is going really, really fast to make sure that, as it falls towards the earth, it continually misses it. changing course is not just a case of stopping and going in a different direction, because you would just fall straight back down to earth. no, this kind of manoeuvre needs maths and fuel and lots of both. so, the early iterations, that will have a finite set of fuel, but the next generations will be refuellable. 0r they'll be solar—powered. and so, they will be able to be recharged. and what's interesting is one of the reasons quoted for why you might need to go and check out another satellite is national security. in the example that bill gives me, imagine what would happen if a critical satellite mysteriously stopped responding to ground control. every satellite that deploys doesn't have a 360—degree camera or radar system on it, right? just for weight and space concerns. and so, sometimes, they are blind objects up there, that are just communicating their piece of data. and so the ability to go to that region and say, "check that out for me" is critical for national security. is there something attached to it? was it moved out of orbit?
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this constellation of rapid—response satellites is planned to be in orbit by 2025. and before that, firefly is developing a rapid—response rocket for the us space force that can be on standby and ready to take a payload and get it into orbit with just one or two days�* notice. it takes four firefly—designed reaver engines to get that rocket off the ground. and it's the test of one of those that we are here to film today. is this your baby? or is this one of your babies? this is one of my babies. 0k. sporting her lucky launch shoes, brigitte 0akes will be studying the rocket test in great detail. from an engine perspective, we want to make sure that our engines start up healthy, steady state that is healthy, and we're getting the thrust and power levels that we need.
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and a lot of that, most of all of that, we can be able to test on the ground, because those are the things that we want to make sure are healthy in orbit. what's the height of it? is it pretty muchjust a horizontal flame? it doesn't go too high? now, we've brought along a friend to film the test. remember gav? he is one half of the slow mo guys, who helped me to get egg all over my face a couple of weeks ago, and he's going to be capturing the action at 2,000 frames per second. that's 80 times slower than real life. the only thing is, he, like the rest of us, has to be hundreds of metres away when the rocket ignites, so i'm going to leave him to set the remote triggers and work out how his camera's not going to be incinerated. and we will come back later in the programme to watch a rocket ignite like you've never seen before. nasa has been putting rockets into space since the �*50s and, increasingly, it's been working with companies like firefly
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to deliver its stuff. marc cieslak�*s been finding out more about its future plans with nasa's dr christleohnson. and liftoff of artemis i. the artemis moon mission signalled nasa's continued commitment to space exploration. what recent technological advances do you think make a sustainable settlement on mars a realistic proposition? oh, my goodness. so, we've had improvements in communication. we've had a demonstration of the laser communications relay from the international space station. so, laser communication is going to make the pipeline you can get send a whole lot more data. there's also been quite a bit of investment in al and virtual reality. people think that the gaming technology is just for gaming, but no. so, imagine, if we're going to have people living on mars, you're going to have to have a way to really be able to assess what's happening inside the body, without carrying an mri with you there.
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if you can imagine having sensors on your body where you can pull the heart out virtually and spin it around and see what's happening, that's going to be incredible. how important will collaboration be between nasa and private companies in achieving a sustainable presence on mars? this is absolutely critical. there's no way that nasa can do this alone, and there's no way that all of the agencies, the international agencies that nasa partners with, there's no way that they could do it alone. you think about spacex, in the united states, space has gotten where it is in collaboration and partnership with nasa. nasa has invested quite a bit of money in spacex to help get where they are, and we are going to continue working with private industry companies like spacex and some of the new space companies that are coming out. does space have a role in helping us solve terrestrial issues? absolutely. the james webb space telescope — in order for those mirrors to give
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you the beautiful images that you see today, we had to very precisely measure the curvature of those mirrors. so we came up with algorithms and technology to be able to do that, and we transferred that to the ophthalmology community, so that they can scan the surface of your eye very, very precisely and very quickly, so that they can determine astigmatisms, far—sightedness, near—sightedness. 0n the international space station, we have a system that has to capture the waste water there, the water from your respiration, from your sweat and from your urine, and be able to take that and transfer it into drinking water. and apparently good—tasting drinking water. they can actually take very contaminated water out in the field, that is filled with bacteria, and be able to process that water to get 99% of the bacteria and everything out of that so that you can have pure drinking water in remote locations. when you have really impossible dreams and impossible goals, if you reach for those goals
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and you create things that don't exist to achieve those goals, you inadvertently create incredible, revolutionary changes for improving the quality of life. present aid and call for the sale of tiktok to reduce potential influence by the chinese government. 0ver tiktok to reduce potential influence by the chinese government. over half a dozen countries have full or potential bands of its use in government devices due to privacy and security fears. google has started rolling out its ai chat but barred on the bbc was one of the first to try it out.— first to try it out. let's start by askin: first to try it out. let's start by asking bard — first to try it out. let's start by asking bard to _ first to try it out. let's start by asking bard to write _ first to try it out. let's start by asking bard to write a -
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first to try it out. let's start by asking bard to write a thank i first to try it out. let's start by l asking bard to write a thank you note for a wedding gift. not bad. unlike chat gpt, it can access up—to—date information from the internet, but... google warned that bard could have limitations. and it might share misinformation. amazon will cut another 9,000 jobs as it seeks to save costs — with one and a half million people employed worldwide. the firm already said injanuary that it was due to acts jobs. microsoft has announced plans to launch its xbox mobile gaming online next year. one of the hottest trends in the cosmetics world is personalised beauty. brands are creating digital tools
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that recommend shoppers products like foundation or eye shadow specifically for their unique skin type. there are plenty of personalisation services out there, but what about a device designed to detect the skin's undertone? skin undertone in cosmetics is basically what we call hue in science. it's not about "is your skin light or is it dark?", so it's nothing to do with lightness. it's to do with the colour that runs through your skin. so, you can be very light and be pink, you can be very light and be yellow. and it's very important to know that, so you can actually get beauty products that work for you. there are different ways to measure skin undertone, but farah believes her company's skin—colour chart, which powers the tool, makes the method unique. having an actually olive complexion, i really struggled to find make—up that would match. and being a biochemist,
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i decided to look into it. and i discovered that beauty magazines were recommending, "look at your veins and that will help "determine your undertones." we realised that there was no way that actually skin was being classified accurately. so we thought, "right, we need to start right at the beginning." we started by reclassifying the entire human skin gamut entirely, and we came up with what's called the naz—westland index, and that gave us the base to say, "right, now we understand the classification of human skin, "we can digitalise this system." shall we give it a go? shall i give it a try? let's give it a go. 0k, brilliant. so, ok, that's me taking my selfie. and can you tell me, what does this information here say? we've identified five different types of undertone, which is very different to what the beauty industry has at the moment. so, basically, it's saying that you have quite a large percentage of yellow and green in your skin, which is the determining factor in olive skins. the web—based tool is powered by ai, which required a colour scientist,
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from the university of leeds, to analyse thousands of images of skin. some photos were captured in a very precise colour measurement camera booth called a digieye, while others were snapped on phones, laptops or regular cameras. but it was streamlining the quality of these images that proved challenging. when we use a smartphone to take a picture of someone, it gets red, green or blue rgb values in every pixel. actually converting camera rgb values into something scientifically meaningful is very, very difficult. we used some relatively simple machine—learning algorithms, and to do that, we need to have lots of examples of images of people and then their true skin colour, which we measure in the laboratory. and based on those two sets of data, we can learn relationships between the two. what were your key findings in
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the process of creating the index? the main way in which people's skin colour varies is in terms of hue and lightness. we actually analysed quite a lot of people who had very, very dark skin in our process. we didn't find anybody with a blue undertone, if you like, so we tend to think that's probably a myth. the web—based tool and the index provide a framework for the detection of up to 10,000 different skin undertones. if you can basically specify every single person's skin colour uniquely, using the app and this index, then you actually have the potential in the future to match, for example, cosmetic foundation to an individual's skin colour. and in an industry where there's a lot of wastage, partially because people are buying the wrong products, further personalisation could be a good idea.
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we're hoping that people can come in, build on that knowledge to allow the beauty industry and other industries to really thrive, so that we can actually notjust talk about inclusivity and skin tone, but we can also make sure that consumers are being catered for properly. scotland — there's no better place to enjoy nature. going for a walk and getting outdoors is so good for you, not just to stretch the legs, but also for your mental health as well. but sometimes, the route you want to go on just isn't on the map. well, it's hoped that's going to change, and that's where these guys come in. this group are from ramblers scotland, a charity who are passionate about walking.
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scotland has really good access rights, so you can walk more or less wherever you wish, as long as you're responsible about it. but it lacks a complete map of its path network. so the charity's been creating a digital map of its own. it brings together all known existing paths, using data from ordnance survey and information from 0penstreetmap and local authorities. one of the surprising things about scotland is it's actually harder to find places to walk than you might imagine. we've got all this amazing green space around us but, actually, if you pick up a paper map, you might really struggle to find a path you want to walk. and so, one of the things that we're trying to do with the scottish paths map is actually to make those places easier to find for everybody, wherever they live. how many paths do you think are out there for people to discover that aren't on the map? so, we've discovered something like 20,000 new paths in the short
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time we've been running the project already. i think that probably, we could easily double the number of paths that people have to walk in scotland when they look at this map, compared to many traditional maps. we've hoovered up all the open—source data, all the data we can get from partners, but now we're working with 300—plus fabulous volunteers to discover more paths, but also to record information about all the paths that we discover. the only way it was ever going to work is if we had the support of people who love the outdoors, who love walking, who love maps, who love technology. the tech is powered by esri uk. the geographical software uses powerful mapping and spatial data analytics technology. it allows the team to create and manage the location information, and it's all done on your phone. digital mapping is really the way forward, isn't it? yeah. it means that we can make changes super—quick and make it easily accessible to everyone.
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but also, it's interactive and we can change things on the fly, we can highlight things, we can take things out, we can add things in. so, it's much more responsive and adaptable compared to when you're just updating stuff like paper maps. can you show me how it all works? yeah, of course. you go to the map of where you are, you find the path that you want. you just tap on the path and then tap on "open survey". and then that takes you through to the questionnaire. and then we just tell volunteers that they can fill in as much or as little as possible. much of the questions are not mandatory, so if the volunteers aren't sure about something, they can skip it, because we don't want to put them off, saying, "i don't know that question, "so i'm not going to do it at all." volunteers have so far added over 9,000 new paths to the interactive map, from as far north as the shetland islands to the borders region in the south. i think the project's really important for our paths in scotland. it's a chance to support and to maintain that right to roam, but it also makes these paths more accessible to a wider variety of people.
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it means that everyone can get out there. and we're on a nice path here in perthshire, is this a path you've been on before? it's not. and in fact, it's one that isn't on the maps yet. so today, we're ticking another one off the list as we go. and it's notjust the coordinates, but the data about the route and information that walkers might find useful that's recorded, like how steep the hills are, is it muddy, is it stoney? and even if there's angry landowners nearby. ramblers maps shows the status of paths in different colours and volunteers use it to check what needs surveying. purple shows new paths yet to be audited, like the one we're standing on, and then the green shows a completed path. just looking at the map, you can see the majority of the 40,000 miles of paths still need to be audited. but if more volunteers come out and enjoy notjust the walks but the technology too, the team will only get closer to achieving their aim.
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now, earlier in the programme, we'd met back up with gav, from the slow mo guys, to film a rocket engine test at 80 times slow motion. that's 2,000 frames per second. and here's how we got on. we're in a nice, flat part of texas. seems a sensible place to do a rocket test, doesn't it? and as you walk along, you start to get hints that, yeah, there's something going on here. lots of compressed nitrogen in canisters. then you get to this shed. there's a massive canister of something there, some more serious and complicated—looking pipes, some dials. and you start to get the impression, yeah, the engine must be quite close by now. and then, oh, actually, no. this is actually the engine that we've been walking past. they've attached it to a building, so at least it's not going to go anywhere. and what's also interesting is how we have to film this test. we have to put our cameras
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inside these protective boxes, for obvious reasons. and then a whole hour before they run the test, we need to clear out of here, which means we have to run a really long remote—control wire for our cameras, all the way around to that remote viewing area, there. we did bring the really long wire, didn't we? the camera's locked down and the remote control line is set. and with duckner left in charge of the heat absorption lake and us having retreated to a safe distance... operator, please start the hot fire engine. i ..it�*s time. main burst in three, two, one. feel the rumbling!
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whoo! that went right through me! wow! that was so loud and so bright. i just... my eyes couldn't... that's like looking at the sun. wow. and finally, it's time to see whether we caught the shot that everyone wants to see. what were the risks? yeah. the power could have come out, the trigger could have been wrong. the camera could have melted. an asteroid could have just come straight down. 0k, well, i think that that didn't happen. all right. so, we seem to have... 0k, we're... 0h! 0k. immediately! there's footage! wow. oh, wow. it's just igniting the air.
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look at the shockwaves on the flame. oh, my gosh. so, this is kind of pulsing. that is incredible. that is so cool. so, that smoke is coming out at quite a speed. look how dark i made this image, and it's still very bright. yeah. but we are seeing detail, we're seeing information right around the end of the booster, there. and that is it for this week. i will leave you with the beauty shots. oh, and if you are worried about duckner, well, he was found 500 feet away and returned to his natural habitat, uncooked.
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hello there. it's been a rather wet start to the day for england and wales but, gradually, that rain has been clearing away to the south—east and leaving quite a few puddles around this morning. that's the scene in kent at the moment. but it will get drier as the day goes on. that rain finally clears away from kent and east sussex this afternoon. one or two bright spells developing, but some wintry showers affecting the far north—east of scotland, some snow over the higher ground here. colder air spreading in, so temperatures, 3 or 4 celsius in northern areas. it will feel colder than that in the exposed wind. further south, stilljust about in double figures. but of course, we're now in british summertime, clocks have gone forward. just a reminder that sunset today is roughly about 7:30 this evening. now, as we go through into tonight,
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we're going to see those showers clearing away. there'll be some clear skies. one or two mist and fog patches forming into the early hours of monday, but with those clear skies and the colder air moving southwards, we're going to see a frost quite widely across northern and north—eastern areas. temperatures down to —i, —2 degrees celsius. perhaps only 3 or 4 degrees further south and west. but during monday, high pressure is in charge of the weather and that keeps things relatively settled. so it's going to be a drier day. we'll keep these weather systems just at bay for the time being. one or two mist and fog patches, then, first thing in the morning. those will clear away fairly quickly, and then we're looking at lots of blue skies and sunshine throughout the day. one or two showers, perhaps, in the far south—west of england, south wales later on. and again, it will still feel quite chilly. temperatures about 8,10 or 11 degrees celsius. but hopefully, some sunshine will at least compensate that. but through into tuesday, we're going to see this area of high pressure move away. a big area of low pressure then
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in the atlantic will throw some weather systems into the uk. now, as that wet weather hits the colder air across scotland, there could be a bit of transient snow over the higher ground. pretty wet conditions developing quite widely around the west. i think towards the eastern and south—eastern areas, it'll stay largely dry until later in the day. a blustery wind developing, but temperatures will start to creep up to about 11 or 12 degrees, although still a little bit chilly across the far east. now, for the rest of the week, it remains pretty unsettled, although you notice those temperatures will continue to climb. so by thursday, we could see temperatures rising to about 16, i7, maybe even 18 degrees celsius. so just a temporary blip of cold weather, before it turns milder again. goodbye.
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this is bbc news — welcome if you're watching here in the uk or around the globe. our top stories... ukraine accuses vladimir putin of making belarus a "nuclear hostage" after the russian leader said he would station nuclear weapons there. a state of emergency in mississippi — after a powerful tornado kills at least 26 people. as soon as we would go from one vehicle to the next vehicle orfrom building to building we could hear screams and we could hear cries for help. voters in berlin are to decide whether germany's capital should be carbon neutral by 2030. people in lebanon have woken up this morning in two time zones, as the country's authorities are unable to agree
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when clocks should go forward.

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