this week, alastair�*s looking to the skies for guidance. we're going to get some help navigating from up there. she is getting hangry with a robot hand. no pressure, but i am quite hungry. i'm not sure how peeling that lettuce is looking after having that done to it. and spencer leaps forward to the year 2125. from eye to eye with a cuttlefish. doesn't he need a snorkel for that? mit's computer science and artificial intelligence laboratory is a world leading facility, but today i've come facility, but today i've come to teach you a thing or two to the robots. that is not the people. in a bid to help them behave as humanly as possible, especially with the tasks that we wouldn't give a second thought to. this reinforcement learning where the machines mimic humans,

is how the ai is trained. it aims to make the bots less, well, robotic and more multi—skilled. this motion is actually independent of where we place the glass and the pitcher, so we can have a much more adaptive system that does not need to have everything specified precisely. in fact, this is part of the magic of machine learning. with machine learning, we can turn pre—programmed robots into intelligent machines. that means we can use data, we can use text, we can use images, we can even use muscle activity. and we can learn from this data how to do tasks in a much more seamless way. baxter has also been trained on doing the dishes and chopping veg. wouldn't that be nice? meanwhile, robotic hand, anyone? so laura, this is another robot we've been working on. and what's special about the hand is that it's got a very compliant body, so it's got skin.

in other words, soft material. can i touch it? you can touch it. it feels like silicon. but i can also feel what is like the bones inside. so the reason we put bones inside is because we want to have a hand that is compliant. and that's what we get from the silicon. on with the glove and time for a lighter task to start. my hands starting off in the same position as the bot. and the idea is that i'm going to train it to pick up that dollar bill. it's really sensitive to movement, as you can see here, just the tiniest turns and you can really see them. also, those movements are quite human. if i do a kind of typing action... look at that. look at the fingers

in real time. right so if i now move my hand down as though i'm going to pick up the dollar bill... 0k. you're over there. you're off. you have to shift. i tried and failed repeatedly, so i'm not sure how much use this training was. 0h. oh, so close! it's so frustrating. next up, a look at how robots can work as a team. think swarm of ants. what sort of real world usage with robotics created on this basis have? you could take a swarm of robots like these ones and get them to go up a bridge to ensure the integrity of the bridge. we have to consider what should the body do, what should the brain do? and depending on the task of the robot, how should we design the body so that the body is capable of the task? but that's not enough. we then need the brain to get the body to do

what it's meant to do. and i suppose the interaction between devices is really important for real world purposes, like self—driving cars, that they'd be able to see each other and understand how to interact with what's around them. exactly. so the coordination and group behaviour we get from local interactions to global behaviour are super important. that is part of physical intelligence, that is part of getting robots to perceive the world around them and reason about it. and now it's turtle time. crush is autonomous, having learned to swim from data collected on real sea turtles. this actually gives us a very naturally moving robot that goes in the sea and does not disturb the sea life, and that allows us to study the sea life better. this robot is able to move whatever way we want in the sea. all of this enabled by its algorithms.

i can actually see how natural the movement seems. the fact that it's not that even it's smooth, but it doesn't seem that sort of organised in its movement, which is, of course, a very real way that a creature would behave. exactly. from the seas to the skies, devices are not only learning from the physical world, but also from language and al's ability to reason. move towards the bag. this drone is being trained to understand instructions in any language. it's never seen a red bag or a traffic cone in its data set. but combining its understanding of language and vision, it is able to reason. so should be able to understand and carry out this command and so many more. and there it is, just by me instructing it in my own words, it ended up in the right spot.

before i go, though, i have been promised some lunch. someone�*s making me a sandwich. no pressure, but i am quite hungry. not sure how appealing that lettuce is looking after having that done to it. it's not manhandled. it's robot handled. it's getting there. turns out that for robots, some of the jobs that we find the easiest are going to take some time to learn. it's like watching someone with a claw machine, just a really advanced version. and there we have it. i'm going to show you a couple of seconds. i'll grab you by the back and hold you tight. you sit there, 0k? rough seas, high winds and flooding arejust some extreme weather conditions

this lifeboat crew must navigate based on the southwest coast of scotland. navigate based on the south—west coast of scotland. the volunteers of nith inshore rescue are tasked with saving lives at sea. yes, even tam the dog. but the stretch of water where they launched the lifeboat, an estuary on the solway firth, is exposed to rapidly moving tides. this creates tidal flats, basically sand and mud that move around. they're dangerous and difficult to map. it's the second—biggest tidal range in the uk and so when the tide�*s running, you can get a bore. so a wave will come in and literally salt flats, the mudflats and the sand gets covered very, very quickly. and that creates kind of a challenge around how we navigate out of this space, because it can lead to us not being able to get to where we need to at that critical moment. and with those tidal flats changing, sometimes

weekly, it's almost impossible to chart a safe route out to people in danger. but now they've got a new tool to help them out. we are about to get some help from the crew. but when we're there, we're going to get some help navigating from up there. orbiting above us. this is the european space agency's sentinel two mission. the satellites pass over the earth 14 times a day, gathering a mix of data, including radar. it's then analysed by a team from strathclyde university to identify safe routes through the water. so what we've got here is a marine chart that shows us the area of the upper solway firth. if ijust zoom out a second, you'll see this whole white block. that's an area that basically means it's uncharted. and this is the area

that you operating. this is the area we're operating. so that's a whole lot of sandbanks that are exposed when the tide are out. and although we can see a lot of water here, there's a whole range of different depths. we'll shortly see the depth change. it'll change fairly dramatically. if we go beyond the channel then it'll drop off as well. the low depth means the danger of the boat running aground is high. traditionally, that means they've had to travel slowly to a rescue or relied on data gathered by hand, literally putting a stick in the water to see how deep it is. if i zoom in, these little red dots is the channel being marked that's been generated by that, that satellite data. so the university of strathclyde have given us a whole load of waypoints in a file, and we'd literallyjust upload those into this, into this chart. you effectively get a satnav for being out in the water. yeah, absolutely. yeah. laurie, who is at the helm, has got a repeat of this screen so he can see what we can see here. before turning to space, the team tried using

pictures from drones to see the tidal flats. but there is a problem. a day out on the water here is rarely as beautiful and clear as it is today. the problem that we have in the west of scotland in particular- is that it is very- cloudy, so you might occasionally get - a cloud—free image, but they're really unusual. so we're using radar data. radar penetrates through the cloud and it gives- us much more frequent imagery of the area. i but it's also much more complicated to process that data. and that was the real- challenge that we had here. and so, it is looking effectively at the ground and seeing where the sandbanks are. yes, it's looking at the... where is the water? where is the exposed sand and mud? - where is the coastline? and then if we can get images at low tide, then we can show| the where the water channel is, and then the crew can navigatel

to the naked eye, you can start to see it. - but that's quite a manual process to actually - just click and say, well go here. - what we're going to dol is automate that so that you can then do it not . just here, but you could do it anywhere on any tidal flat system. - what the algorithm spits out is effectively - latitude and longitude. and we then take those and create what's - called a gpx file. gpx file goes into your garmin, | goes into the navigation device j on the boat so the crew can walk that directly. onto their navigation device. for gwilym and the inshore rescue team, radar imagery is helping them to save lives at sea more safely and at speed. people locally and others who look at it, it's kind of a wizardry. it's kind of, like, a real magical thing that the first time we can go and here's a set of waypoints that recently have been captured as a guide for navigation. it literally gives us a kind of an eye of what's under the water, you know, where the edges of that channel are, and that for the first time, a confidence that we can head in a certain route. time for a look at this week's tech news.

the price of bitcoin has risen to over $80,000 for the first time ever, following donald trump's recent victory in the us election. during the election campaign, trump said he would create a strategic bitcoin stockpile and appoint digital asset friendly financial regulators, raising expectations that he might strip back regulations on the crypto industry. 0ther cryptocurrencies are also making gains. bitcoin is a high—risk investment asset, and values can spectacularly fall as well as increase. natwest group has blocked messaging services like whatsapp, skype and facebook messenger on company devices in the uk. in a statement, natwest said that like many organisations, we only permit the use of approved channels for communicating about business matters. mobile operator 02 has created an ai granny

to waste the time of phone scammers called daisy. it will keep scammers busy, tricking them into thinking that they're speaking to a real person by keeping them chatting. while they're busy talking to me, they can't be scamming you. and let's face it, dear, i've got all the time in the world. the aim is to prevent real victims being targeted, whilst the bot can also help to give insights into common tactics that scammers use. there is a lot of seaweed in our oceans and it's spreading fast because of climate change. it smothers coastlines around the world, disrupting tourism, fisheries and transport. but some scientists think it could be used as a natural resource to manufacture goods in a sustainable way. well, we visited a lab in norway, which is working on a new method to make antibiotics by training bacteria to eat seaweed.

seaweed is a big part of the world. we would like to use this species as food for bacteria to produce as antibiotics, vitamins, any food ingredient you can think about. what we would like to do is to use cell factories. it's a bacteria that became expert on consuming sugars and producing antibiotics or vitamins. cell factories today are mainly consumed glucose—based biomass, which is, for example, a sugar cane. in many places, they grow huge amount of sugar cane, which cause deforestation. since this biomass is so abundant all over the planet, the idea is to try to use this instead of the food—based glucose.

but these cell factories were not evolved to eat these sugars. we will need to teach the bacteria or to engineer it to consume these sugars. otherwise, it will not grow. this lab is about investigating how to optimally grow bacteria. so we are developing all the software ourselves. artificial intelligence algorithms, the machine learning. it's all custom—made in—house. the seaweed is taken by the companies. they use high pressure and temperature to break down the seaweed into the sugar molecules. so we are now studying how we can feed these into the bacteria and how the bacteria reacts to it. this is a vessel, you see,

where the bacteria grows. it's fully maintained automatically temperature, the acidity, the oxygen level. if we change any of the conditions, it immediately reacts. we study how it reacts and how it produces the molecule we want. so a sample is taken from the reactor because we want to analyse and understand how much antibiotics theory is producing or how much sugar it consumes. ideally, we want the bacteria to consume all the sugars and then, to grow and produce what it needs to produce. we have algorithms that understand what's happening to the model and then do calculations on what the bacteria needs. it feeds the bacteria. it keeps it alive. now the challenge is reduced to how to optimise it. there is a big amount of seaweed everywhere from india to indonesia. it can create jobs for farmers and they do grow it today. but the value of this is very, very low.

once we make it a valuable material for fermentation and new ones will appear in countries that don't have so manyjobs. deep in the heart of london's natural history museum, the exhibits are coming to life. i'm surrounded by fireflies. oh, wow! visions of nature takes visitors to the year 2125 to see how the natural world is adapting to climate change and human behaviour. when people think about museums, they often associate them with the past, maybe the present. the great thing about this exhibition and this experience is it gives us a chance to talk about the future and to present a view of the future. we've worked really, really closely with the museum scientists to make sure that that future is credible and is based on a scientific, rigorous process. and whilst none of us know what's going to

happen in the future, you know these are imagined scenarios, but they are scenarios based on current science, current thinking about what the really big challenges facing the planet are, but also what the most beneficial actions to try and address them are. from eye to eye with the cuttlefish. this is a mixed reality experience. some of the exhibition is physically here, but the real stars come out when you look through microsoft's hololens 2 headset. the great thing about using technology in this way is that it allows you to encounter nature and encounter these species in a way that most of us, to be honest, are probably quite unlikely to experience in our lives. but by giving people the chance to encounter nature in that way, hopefully it can encourage us even more to to think about the sort of positive actions that we can take. there are eight ecosystems to explore, from the scottish highlands to

the deepest oceans. just about to free this giant coconut crab from a bit of plastic that's got tangled in. yes, there we go. result. the coconut crab is the world's largest terrestrial invertebrates. what that means is, whether they're born and they grow up in the water, they then move to land. and adult crabs can't actually swim and they can't go back into the ocean. it's a weird quirk of evolution. they're also absolutely enormous, and apparently, their pincers are strong enough that they can crack coconuts. so i'm going to stay out of the way of this guy. scientists don't know exactly how animals may adapt and change in the next 100 years, but this exhibition illustrates likely scenarios. for example, as waters warm,

belugas and narwhals may move into the same environment and interbreed, breed, producing new offspring called nalgas. scientists were also asked to predict what might happen to these strange creatures. now here comes a colugo. colugo is known as a flying lemur, but they don't fly, and they're not lemurs, so they're a very unusual mammal. they're sort of out there on their own. so colugos normally prefer dense forest, and they have to have trees relatively closely spaced together in order to be able to move about because they glide and not fly, and they need to be able to get up to a certain height and then use that height and do a long glide. and the idea is that as deforestation carries on, there will be less and less trees and they'll be further apart.

and also potentially, trees won't be as tall, but they can, in theory, glide tens and potentially up to 100m or more. so the idea is that some of them that are better at gliding could survive in the future with less forest. this is the other beautiful thing about the hololens. it can recognise your hands, so when you put them out you can interact. ijust had a firefly landed on my finger. the device we're using, the - hololens, has a lot of sensors. and what we love | is this technology, actually, you can interact with the headset itself i with your fingers. so we try to design . some action from the visitors that are linked to their action. - because when you act on something, you i are into the story. and when you interact, you have an impact. i and that's what we want to do with that technology, - to have the visitor— have an impact on the story.

i think if you really want to enjoy a mixed reality experience, you have to be a bit forgiving because the technology is still evolving. for example, the images don't go right the way to the edge of your vision. they're kind of in these smallish windows in the centre of what you can see. so sometimes, an animal might drop off out of this rectangle, but if you can get over that, it is a really immersive experience. as you turn your head, as you move around, all the creatures stay absolutely locked in the 3d space they're supposed to be in, and it is an immersive experience. hello! i was quite surprised at how hopeful this experience is. i was expecting to put on this headset and see that the world of 2125 is just armageddon. but actually what this tells you is that yes, things are getting worse, but if we start to take action now, in 100 years' time, we could have improved things. the world will look different, species will have reacted in different ways, but we may very well be able to pull things back from the brink.

we've really consciously tried to project a hopeful message around it. it's really easy to feel disempowered by the sheer scale of the crisis that the planet and the natural world is facing, and that can sometimes translate into apathy, actually, because it just feels too big a problem to to be able to do anything about. what we've really tried to do with this exhibition is show that there are positive actions that we can take. and that's it from us here at the natural history museum in london, a place that doesn't just have spectacular views of the past, but also some pretty encouraging views of the future too. from me and hope, the blue whale. thanks for watching and we'll see you soon.

hello there. once again, morning fog could be an issue for some, but the weather story is on the change as we head into the weekend. rain will arrive, and that is going to help writer with sunny spells and scattered showers. you can see the temperature controls from north to south pretty cold in the north when you factor in the north when you factor in the strong northerly winds.

through saturday night, cold air continues to turn south and eventually reaching all areas and will continue with wintry showers around coastal areas and a risk of ice as well. will be a cold night. if you come across the northern half of the country, turning cold across the south but sunday, will be cold but brighter with such a bright parts of england and wales. showers across the north west of england and scotland and an area of low pressure which was start to push away to northern ireland and increasingly across england and wales. temperatures on sunday could do is or 11 degrees in the south but another cold one in central and northern areas. for sunday night, that's rain becomes heavier and pushed its way eastwards. a rather a white knight to come for the southern half of the country and has a wonder —— milder and windier —— but rather a wet night to come for this other half of the country. you can see temperatures contrast on monday. start of next week, through monday, it could cause some issues. headache to the uncertainty of this area of low

pressure. could be further north or further south. it looks like it is north, could see some snow through the south, many some rain and there will be strong winds. as it pulls away, into the new continent, it opens the floodgates to even call the arctic northerly from tuesday onwards. you can see from the chance of rain southwards and chooseit chance of rain southwards and choose it on was, very cold with a cold night. —— tuesday onwards, record. —— very cold.

live from washington. this is bbc news. controversy around president—elect trumps�* cabinet nominations continues, as a top republican comes out against releasing an ethics report on former congressman matt gaetz. trump's pick of vaccine sceptic robert f kennedyjunior to lead america's health agencies sparks concern across the scientific community. and trump taps north dakota's governor doug burgum as interior secretary and energy tsar — tasked with revving up energy production.

hello i'm carl nasman. welcome to this special programme on president—elect donald trump's transition into power. this week we've seen a flurry of announcements, featuring some divisive choices for his team before he takes office injanuary. shortly we'll speak to a public health professor about trump's pick of the environmentalist and vaccine sceptic robert f kenneder to lead the department of health and human services. one of the most controversial choices is former florida congressman matt gaetz as attorney general — he faced an ethics investigation as a member of the house of representatives. and — a fox news tv host, pete hegseth, is being nominated as secretary of defence — he is a miltary veteran but has never held political office. and north dakota gov. doug burgum will lead the interior department, an agency whose portfolio includes both on—shore and off—shore drilling. we'll speak to congresswoman melanie stansbury who's serves on the house committee on natural resources. we'll get reaction to all those appointments from our panel — former republican congressman rodney davis, and democratic strategist quentin james.