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tv   Click  BBC News  July 2, 2023 5:30am-6:00am BST

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seven new nhs gambling clinics are to open in england this summer — that's almost double the current number. around m00 patients were referred for help last year, and health leaders warn that children and adults are being bombarded with betting adverts. now on bbc news, click. this week — the simplest explanation to a complicated piece of tech. what do you do? we use data from space to improve life on earth. 0k. we're done, right? well, that went well. we call out the climate change deniers on tiktok. three facts why climate
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change is not man—made. the banks of this world know it's not going to happen! and paul goes for the ride of his life. you know, there's more to light than meets the eye, and i mean that literally. although it gives us all of the beautiful colours of the rainbow, we can only see a small fraction of the light that's all around us. we can't see infrared, but we can feel it as heat. ultraviolet is invisible but our skin knows if we have too much of it. and then there are x—rays and gamma rays and microwaves, but it's radio waves that i've
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come to talk about today. this is spire global, which makes satellites that listen to the radio waves that bounce around and off of the earth. we use data from space to improve life on earth — full stop. we're done, right? ok, so maybe it's a bit more complicated than that. spire has a network of around 100 satellites in orbit that monitor the radio waves broadcast by things like planes and ships, along with natural radio waves that are reflected off those objects, off the sea, off the land and that bounce through the atmosphere. and then it's up to their customers to decide what to do with that data. one of our kind of bread and butter applications is looking at how gps signals bend as they pass through our atmosphere. by looking at how much they bend, you can calculate
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quite precisely, down to a tenth of a degree calvin, what the pressure and temperature of the air they're passing through is. it's a really important data source. you allow your satellites to be used as a subscription service? they're already up there and then you say to companies... that's right. .."do you want them." some customers have unique needs and very unique ideas and we help them upload those applications. so just like you would download an app to you smart phone, you can upload an app to one of your satellites? absolutely, so the same way it was crazy 20, 30 years ago that as a company you could launch a website by uploading it to this invisible cloud, it is now becoming possible for organisations, even individuals, to upload an application to outer space and operate it from there. technically, you wouldn't call that the cloud because above the clouds — do you have a name for it? not yet. we call it space services, it's very boring. yeah, it's too boring — you need something else. yeah, like the nebula, right? great. the cloud in space, right?
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very good, great. what i still find amazing is that as well as the normal big satellites that we've all seen being launched into space, this is also a satellite these days. it's called a cubesat, it comes with popout solar panels and what you do is you pack these into the empty space around the big satellites in the rocket when they go up. so suddenly you don't need to buy your own rocket to get something like this into space. you can put whatever you want inside one of these things but they come with some standard kit, like solar powered batteries and an orientation system to make sure the things always pointing in the right direction. and that includes a little star camera which looks for particular constellations of stars and if they're not quite at the right angle then it re—orientates itself using a spinning wheel that's inside and also a magnet which can push against the earth's magnetic field. some satellites are used to help with climate analysis. for example, the way that radio waves bounce off the ground can
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tell you how moist the soil. and the way that radio waves bend as they travel through the atmosphere can help precisely determine the air temperature. and then they are the ships. by comparing the id signals broadcast by vessels with their actual positions, as given away by radio wave reflections, it's possible to spot if fishing boats are saying one thing but doing another. so, that might be somebody fishing when they're not licensed to. it might be a vessel fishing once, their license for one haul, and then selling that haul on the high seas, fishing again and then coming into port and saying, "here, i've only fished once." other activity that happens on the high seas, obviously trade being a massive one of them, and with the war which is happening in ukraine right now, the fascinating studies that have been done using our data showing how grain is being taken out of ukraine and laundered
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so to speak on the high seas, combined from other sources to obfuscate the fact that it was taken from ukraine. 0r there's other vessel operators that have been breaking sanctions and exchanging oil with russia and, again, without this data there would be no way to spot that activity. and all of this has become possible because components have shrunk down and down and down and got more and more sensitive. they test the satellites�* radio communication in this anechoic chamber which absorbs all extra sounds, radio frequencies and also it looks like something that indiana jones might get trapped in. smaller, cheaper satellites like these have made it possible for many more organisations to use space as a service, especially when the satellites are already up there and all you have to do is develop computer code to run on them. so, what we're looking at here is what i call
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the satellite matrix. the satellites there, they're in the simulation. they think they're in space but they're actually on the ground. oh, no. yeah, i know, it's tragic. a little sad. it's great for our customers because they can test their code before their applications get uploaded and off the planet. you're not really in space. it's all a lie. take the blue pill, or is it the red one? meanwhile, let's go back to the real world, shall we? electric vehicles still have many issues that need to be ironed out — the fear of range anxiety, the wait to charge them up and limited battery resources. sweden is embracing a different approach that hopes to tackle some of these problems — electric roads where vehicles can charge up on the go. adrienne murray has paid a visit to a demonstration project in the south of the country where a new type of electric road technology is being put through its paces.
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charging up without plugging it. could this be the future for electric vehicles? in the town of lundt in southern sweden i'm being taken on a spin along evolution road. this looks like a regular electric vehicle but underneath there's something different. there's a pickup that means that it makes contact with electrified rail and can charge up while it's on the go. the road consists of short segments that actually switch on power under the vehicle. the power is following the vehicle. we have more than three sliding contacts, so we get a steady current from the road. the technology here isn't wireless, it's called conductive charging. electricity flows to the vehicle through a metal
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strip that slides along the rail. a camera follows the green led lights to help keep it centred, while an antenna system and series of sensors ensure only specific sections have live current and because it ids the vehicle, the owner can be billed for their energy use. under here you have an antenna receiver, so the vehicle comes, sends a signal. this will switch on to 650 volts when the vehicle is over it and then when it has passed, it will immediately switch off. elonroad, the firm behind the tech, argue that electric roads make more sense than building a huge network of chargers. this is especially important when you have long haul tracks or buses and it's actually cheaper to build electric roads. if everyone has smaller batteries, it will pay for the infrastructure. it works for all types
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of li—wheeled vehicles. to test it out, a tesla and nissan leaf have been modified but there's no connection to those companies. the tech has also been applied to a local bus and even this commercial van. i think it's time i give it a go. i don't get to drive vans very often. so, i'm just going to centre the van. yeah. so, let's see if we can get the pickup down. yep. yeah, there you go. oh, yeah, it's following the... i can see the green lights and it's there, isn't it? yeah, so now you will get the energy to drive and you will charge the battery at the same time and when you leave the road, it will automatically go up. yeah. you can continue driving for twice the length. butjust how safe is it having an electrical current in the middle of the road — both for drivers and the public? we believe we have a really safe system that you cannot hack and it will immediately shut down the road if someone tries to tamper with it.
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the demo road in lund will be here forjust one more year. this is one of the rails that we have on evolution road and being tested in a real—life environment and we take it back and we open it up to see how has it been affected by snow water, ice, whatever. now, new track is being made, ready for high—speed testing in belgium, and the start—up is looking beyond cities — to roads at ports and industrial sites. if you have a broad network of charge rails or an electrical road system, you don't have to carry on board all the energy you need. that means we can reduce the battery sizes. we can accelerate electrification but using much smaller resources compared to everybody having big batteries. it is still going to need a lot of new infrastructure to be built, though, isn't it? all these rails will need to be installed.
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it will require investment but we need to do in order to have this change and i think going forward, it won't be either cords or electrical roads — it will actually be all of the above because we will need so much charging infrastructure to have a 100% fully electric society. here in sweden, plans are moving ahead to build the country's first permanent electrified road by 2025. so, perhaps in the not too distant future we could be powering up as we drive. here is the week in tech. apple hasjoined other tech firms in calling on the uk government to amend its draft online safety bill to protect
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encrypted messaging services, and says those powers could be used to force firms to scan private messages. artificial intelligence technology that cuts the time cancer patients must wait before starting radiotherapy is to be offered at nhs trusts in england. the ai programme helps doctors calculate where to direct therapeutic radiation beams that kill cancer cells while sparing as many healthy ones as possible. we worked out in our hospital in a year, about £7,000 of computing cost to run the technology on cloud gives us back about £100,000 worth of clinician time. researchers in the uk and switzerland have built a drone that could be able to enter burning buildings. the prototype fire drone can withstand temperatures of up to 220 celsius for ten minutes. facebook owner meta has
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launched a vr subscription service to launch its metaverse business, it will give subscribers access to two new games per month. wake up guys, global warming isn't real. i there is no climate change in the manner of which they speak. i've met people out in the real world who have been very sceptical about the work that i do but i want to tell them there are no conspiracies — climate change is real. doug works for the met office as a scientist, so he knows how big a threat climate change is. temperatures in england breeched 40 degrees in england for the first time. devastating scenes that have become all too familiar. this area has not seen sustained rain for two and a half years. the evidence of climate change is overwhelming but on tiktok, you might get a different impression.
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three facts why climate . change is not man—made. the banks of this world know it's not going to happen. there's a lot to be seen which dispute the basic facts of climate change and it's very easy to take away a false picture about how certain we are about climate science. i see this again and again and again. it makes me feel tired and it makes me feel like i want to do better in communicating the science of climate change. and doug has taken matters into his own hands, through tiktok. that's a phrase that we're going to have to get used to. as a climate scientist, i want people to understand how it will impact them, right now and in the future. and doug is not alone. what's up, guys? this is rosh, he studied climate change at university, a subject that is close to his heart. half of my family lives in sri lanka, which is one of the most vulnerable countries in the world to climate change. people i care about are going to be affected and are being affected by climate change in the here and now. rosh has thousands of followers on social media.
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he is known for debunking viral videos that make false claims about climate change. i do that by basically comparing the claims being made to scientific literature and exposing where they go wrong. and rosh says there's no shortage of videos for him to fact check. 0n tiktok, it's arguably particularly bad because of the way tiktok works as a platform. anyone can post anything and it has the potential to reach thousands or even millions of views. bad arguments can spread really fast and there's no real checks and balances there to make sure that the information is accurate. what would you say to people who look at what you do on tiktok and perhaps describe you as the thought police? i'm not trying to censor anyone, and i couldn't if i tried, right? ijust wish there were more people in my position who will stand up and engage in this because at the moment, it is overwhelmingly dominated by people who frankly haven't got the scientific background to have an informed discussion about this.
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tiktok is aware of the problem, so to mark earth month last april, it announced a new policy on climate change misinformation. the company said it would remove content that undermines the well—established scientific consensus on climate change. videos stating, for example, the climate change is not happening or that it's not man—made — a policy that some say goes further than those of other social media platforms. it certainly seems to have taken a slightly more explicit approach to removal. i would say it follows the pattern of other platforms like meta, google and pinterest, in the sense that that it's quite fixated on content moderation. so we decided to put tiktok�*s new policy to the test. we identified 365 videos that broke the rules because they denied man—made climate change is real. we reported those videos to tiktok under the category of harmful misinformation, which is available to any user.
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we waited for at least a day and then went back to find out whether they'd been taken down. as it turns out, almost 95% of the videos we reported were still on tiktok, and make no mistaek — these posts are getting attention. they racked up almost 30 million views. that building over there, that's tiktok�*s uk headquarters, right here at the heart of london. i asked the company for an interview but it declined. instead, it sent us a statement, it said it also said it's working with fact checkers and that people searching for content about climate change on tiktok are being shown a link to authoritative information. after we sent tiktok links to all of the videos we reported, they took most of them down, and the ones that
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are still online, well, for the most part, they will no longer be recommended to new users and to top it all, tiktok suspended 65 accounts that had been posting wrong information about climate change. meanwhile, at the met office, doug feels encouraged by the steps tiktok has taken. as a climate scientist, i really appreciate that tiktok have got this policy and that it's going to take time to make fully operational. still, iasked doug, is kicking people off tiktok, removing their content really the best way to fix the problem? removing harmful content probably has its places but as a scientist, i'm happy to be challenged. maybe we should be focused on really promoting good climate science information, rather than just removing the content that we perhaps don't like. now, we are getting used to the idea of battery—powered vehicles, aren't we? electric cars, electric scooters, even electric bikes, but what about battery—powered trains?
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it kind of feels like that should be possible, doesn't it? but the reality is many lines are not yet electrified and so there are loads of railways that rely on diesel engines. but, europe is now seeing its first trifold passenger trains — these can switch between diesel, electrified lines and their own batteries. and paul carter has been to italy to see them being made, and of course he's taken a ride on one, too. these might look like any other train... ..but they're a first for europe. these trains being built in the heart of tuscany are europe's first tri—mode trains to enter passenger service, having started running on routes in italy at the end of 2022. as well as being fitted
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with a pantograph for overhead power, and a standard diesel engine, they're also fitted with a battery pack power unit and can be switched between modes. these trains are being manufactured by hitachi rail for italian rail operator trenitalia, based on hitachi rail's masaccio platform. the characterisitc is that he can combine during the trip and change this technology during the line, so without any sort of discontinuity and any sort of disruption. trenitalia brands their services around different music genres — such as rock, pop orjazz. they've decided to brand their masaccio trains as blues. diesel trains are still necessary, and are likely to be for some time because of the wide variation in the amount of electrified lines, particularly across europe.
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so train manufacturers and railway operators across the world are looking at greener and more efficient ways to power their trains when external electric power isn't available. however, these trains will still rely on diesel power for large parts of some routes. the batteries only have a range of 15 kilometres at present, though they can be recharged while the train is in operation, both in diesel and electric mode. when it's near a station, the batteries power the train completely, cutting emissions and reducing noise. at other times, they will use overhead power or when the line is un—electrified, the diesel engine. however, the batteries will still be able to power other aspects of the train than just propulsion, such as lighting and heating. so what are some of the challenges with implementing battery technology in trains? is it weight or is it
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power consumption? it's a combination of these two items. so our experts and our designers are continually working on it. reducing the weight means also reducing the energy and the consumption and it's a problem of space, it's a problem of weight. so the evolution of proposal for battery, it's improving this aspect. this is why in terms of weight and size, it's ok but now it will require test and test before it can go on the market. despite this, hitachi claim these new trains will produce 50% less emissions than regular diesel trains. currently we're totally focused on battery solutions. of course, our research and development is working on it but in terms of time to market, we are confident and believe that this solution that will have strong success in the immediate and short—term. like cars, the direction of travel for trains is towards that of battery
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power, but unlike cars, trains aren't quite there yet. now, trains like this specific one are a step in the right direction, but we're still quite a few years out from having fully battery operated trains. but at least we're on right track. that was paul. that is it for now, thanks for watching and we will see you soon. hello there. it looks like this cool and blustery wind will continue to blow through the rest of this weekend. at least, though, we're seeing some sunshine. this was the scene yesterday afternoon at sutton coldfield in the midlands.
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further north and particularly in the north and west of scotland, this is where we've had more cloud and some rather frequent and even heavy showers as well. we've got showers in the same area at the moment. the blustery wind coming in from the west or north—west and it's not particularly warm because the air is originating from around iceland or even greenland. these are the temperatures we're starting with early on sunday, so double—figure temperatures but a fresher feel for england and wales than it was at the same time on saturday. we'll see some sunshine to begin with. the cloud will bubble up. it's mostly fair weather cloud for england and wales. the odd light shower maybe for north wales, more likely in north—west england. some showers developing in northern ireland and particularly again in scotland, where some could be heavy and possibly even thundery as well. strongest winds will be in scotland. blustery everywhere. temperatures on the cool side. 17 scotland, northern ireland to a high of 22 in the south—east of england. and even as we head into the beginning of next week, we've still got those rather cool and blustery winds around as well. that weather front continues to bring some wet weather in the far north of scotland. elsewhere, there'll be some
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sunshine but we're likely to find more showers breaking out and we could see a spell of wet weather pushing its way eastwards over the irish sea and eastwards across england and wales to give some late showers for the first day of wimbledon. and those temperatures are still below par for this time of the year — 16—21 celsius. now, we're in cooler air for the next few days. the jet stream is to the south of the uk. the position of the jet and the strength of the jet is going to be crucial because it could develop this area of rain here into a deeper area of low pressure that could bring some stronger winds as well as some wet weather. a lot of uncertainty about the details, it has to be said, for tuesday. got some rain moving down across scotland and northern ireland, then some showers. now, it looks like the wetter weather will push eastwards across more southern and central parts of england with sunny skies later in wales and the south—west, but things could well change. but what isn't changing is just how chilly it is going to be — 16—20 degrees — and it's going to stay cool for much of the week ahead. after tuesday, it does look a bit drier.
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if you're looking for any warmth, you probably have to wait until friday in the south—east.
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dominance at lord's, good morning. welcome to breakfast, with sarah campbell and rogerjohnson. 0ur headlines today: police and rioters clash in the french city of marseille as the country battles with a fifth night of unrest. the boss of nhs england says children and adults are being "bombarded" with gambling adverts, as more addiction clinics are opened to deal with demand. in sport, england need a captain's innings from ben stokes, as they try to stay in the ashes.
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it's after another day of australian

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