lara's getting hangry with a robot hand. no pressure, but i am quite hungry. i'm not sure how appealing that lettuce is looking after having that done to it. and spencer leaps forward to the year 2125. i'm 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 to teach 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's also been trained on doing the dishes and chopping veg — wouldn't that be nice? meanwhile, robotic hand, anyone? so, lara, 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 silicone, 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 silicone. 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 off, you're off, you're off.

you have to shift. i tried and failed repeatedly, so i'm not sure how much use this training was. 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 uses would 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 a 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 ai�*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. i'm 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 swim out to you in a couple of seconds. i'll grab you by your back and hold you tight. you sit there, 0k? alasdair: rough seas, high winds and flooding are just some extreme weather conditions this lifeboat crew must 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 launch 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 is 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're about to go out on the water with 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—2 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 operate? 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, it's at a whole range of different depths. we'll shortly see the depth change, it'll change fairly dramatically. we go beyond the channel

and 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 satellite data. so the university of strathclyde have given us a whole load of waypoints in a file, and we literally just upload those into this, into this chart. you effectively get a sat nav for being out in the water? yeah. absolutely, yeah. lawrie, 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. 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, kind of, 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 navigate through that water channel. 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 doing is automate that so that you can then do it notjust here, but you could do it anywhere on any type of flat system. what the algorithm spits out is effectively latitude and longitude, and we then take those and create

what's called a gps file. gps file goes into your garmin, goes into the navigation device on the boat so the crew can load 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, "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.

the price of bitcoin has risen to over $80,000 for the first time ever following donald trump's reason victory in the us election. during the campaign trumps said he would create a strategic bitcoin stockpile and appoint digital asset friendly financial regulators, raising expectations he might strip back regulations on the industry. 0ther cryptocurrencies are also making gains. bitcoin is a high risk investment asset and values can fall as well as increase. mount west has blocked messaging services on company devices in the uk. in a statement, they said that like many organisations, we only permit the use of approved channels are communicating about business matters. mobile operator 02 has created an ai grandma to waste the time of foreign scammers. called daisy, it will keep scammers busy,

tricking them to think they are speaking to a real person. while they are talking to me, they cannot be scamming you, and let's face it, i have got all the time in the world. the aim is to _ all the time in the world. the aim is to prevent _ all the time in the world. the aim is to prevent real - all the time in the world. the aim is to prevent real victims being targeted while also giving 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 mainly consume glucose—based biomass, which is, for example, sugar canes. 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. 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 it's 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 happened 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, 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. i'm eye—to—eye with a 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 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.

i'm just about to free this giant coconut crab from a bit of plastic that it's got tangled in. yes! there we go. result. the coconut crab is the world's largest terrestrial invertebrate. what that means is although 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 environments and interbreed, producing new offspring called narlugas.

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, 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 land on my finger. the device we're using, the hololens, has a lot of sensors. and what we love is the technology. actually, you can interact with the headset itself 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 are into the story. and when you interact, you have an impact. 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 and that can sometimes translate into apathy, translate into apathy, actually, because itjust feels actually, because itjust feels too big a problem to be able too big a problem to be able to do anything about. to do anything about. what we've really tried to do what we've really tried to do with this exhibition is show with this exhibition is show that there are positive that there are positive actions that we can take. actions that we can take. and that's it from us here and that's it from us here at the natural history museum at the natural history museum in london, a place that doesn't in london, a place that doesn't just have spectacular views just have spectacular views of the past, but also some of the past, but also some pretty encouraging views pretty encouraging views of the future too. of the future too. from me and hope, the blue mild start to november, from me and hope, the blue whale, thanks for watching whale, thanks for watching and we'll see you soon. and we'll see you soon. hello there. hello there. after what's been a pretty

after what's been a pretty risk the cold air, bringing the risk of snow late on monday and monday night. during the day still some more snow piling up over the high ground in northern scotland, elsewhere cloudy, patchy rain for wales and southern england, whether in northern ireland as the low pressure approaches and begins to move into the cold air. during monday evening and monday night we may find some snow falling in northern ireland, the greater risk of disruption looks like southern scotland and northern england particularly over the hills, mind you we still have the snow falling over the far north of scotland as well. the snow around this area of low pressure will continue overnight across northern england and southern scotland, as it moves away it could get windy through the channel through dover. there was a snow across northern england and southern scotland, easing through the day as the pressure is away but allows the northerly wind to return again

more winter showers around coastal areas. a cold day particularly whether snow is lying, could still have double figures in the far south but it could be colder even here by the middle part of the week as the middle part of the week as the northerly wind returns and pushes cold air down across the whole of the country and bringing with it more winter showers, snow over the hills, particularly in scotland but also northern ireland and draped around this exposed coastal areas. many inland parts will be dry but it will be cold and frosty and those are ridges lower across other parts of england and wales. it will feel cold particularly with the wind. some models take this area of low pressure further north, snow for southern parts of the uk. that looks more likely they will head its way into fronts, keeping us in the cold arctic maritime air mass, meaning sunshine and further winter showers, and those showers

typically 11—5 on thursday. at the end of the week, there typically 11—5 on thursday. at the end of the week, there winds may ease, the showers me winds may ease, the showers me come fewer but over the weekend come fewer but over the weekend if this comes to pass this if this comes to pass this could be the next storm could be the next storm bringing wet weather perhaps bringing wet weather perhaps some snow before the wind some snow before the wind changes to a south or changes to a south or southwesterly, getting milder southwesterly, getting milder across many parts of the across many parts of the country but stay very unsettled country but stay very unsettled indeed. before that happens, a indeed. before that happens, a lot going on, snow, ice and lot going on, snow, ice and some frost as well. at some frost as well.

live from london, live from london, this is bbc news. this is bbc news. china's president xi bids china's president xi bids farewell tojoe biden farewell tojoe biden in his final meeting in his final meeting with current the us leader with current the us leader and pledges to work and pledges to work with incoming president donald with incoming president donald trump. trump. donald trump has named oil donald trump has named oil and gas industry executive and gas industry executive chris wright as his pick chris wright as his pick to lead the us energy to lead the us energy department. department. he is expected to fulfil he is expected to fulfil trump's promise to increase trump's promise to increase fossilfuel production. fossilfuel production. 0n the frontlines of climate change, 0n the frontlines of climate change, pakistan's northern communities pakistan's northern communities face glacial floods face glacial floods and landslides as temperatures rise. we have a special report.

hello.