this is bbc news. we will have the headlines for you at the top of the hour. which is straight after this programme. this week, nick goes down

under to find out how those cogs and wheels keep an iconic building going. but is he getting a bit too hands on? you just shut the whole building down. i better not touch any more. ever wondered what it takes to put on this kind of show? let's go and see some magical secret stuff. alistair�*s going behind the scenes at europe's biggest theme park. now, what vegetation do you think might make the best climbers? mushrooms, apparently. we meet two pioneers replacing the plastic in their sport with fungi. and it's time to get up close and personal with lara here, and a technique that could help diagnose diseases like parkinson's earlier. what would you have been able to do differently? i've been able to go off and do something that i wanted to do, maybe go around the world.

it's one of the most instantly recognisable buildings in the world. the sydney opera house, an architectural marvel that plays host to some 2000 shows and 11 million visitors each year. now, at 51 years old, this unesco world heritage listed performing arts space is more sustainable than ever. and today i'm going backstage to see the innovation at work behind the scenes. this is building operations, which is where the nerve centre of the opera house is. around about 66,000 jobs that come through this office, which is manned 2a over seven. as you know, that's one of the busiest art centres in the world, which we

basically don't sleep. so it's a hive of activity. this is where we control everything from the temperature around the building, waste management, all essential services, security services, hvac, mechanical, you name it. it sort of comes out of this particular office. it's all monitored from here. the building management and control system, or bmcs for short, an interactive digital dashboard engineered by honeywell. and one of the most crucial things for any theatre to get right. temperature. you might have a audience that, you know, we try to maintain 22.5, but if we have a comedian come in, they might want it at 19 degrees. i'm actually surprised by how much it's varying. people in better seats get better temperatures. is it chilly at the back? it's not chilly at the back. um. jokes aside, the house has recently been awarded with the highest six star performance certification by green building council australia and recognition as a global leader in sustainable practice. that's partly down to its fresh focus on air quality. if we do have high pollution levels, we can close close down the amount of outside air that we're bringing into the theatre.

so as you can imagine, when we were going through those devastating bushfires, we were able to actually control the system, to allow low levels of air to be able to come into the venues enough to be able to maintain the system, but to be able to keep the conditions right for the audience and the artists that are performing on stage. 0ver11i00 different sensors are scattered all around the house, feeding live data back to base. when we are operating in a comfortable, better air quality space, we are more productive and even the facility wear and tear reduces greatly. so what the technology is really doing is it's looking at individual spaces every 15 minutes and it's trying to optimise the energy consumption of that space. so that's the temperature there that comes out. that's correct. and i'vejust done something there. that's right. you just shut the whole building down. i better not touch any more. time to move on and see some less sensitive instruments. yeah.

these will do. at any one time, the opera house can have up to 20,000 visitors. so keeping them all cool is a big challenge, because as soon as they arrive, their body heat naturally warms up the venue. so it's original. so it's original engineers thought up a solution using what's right on their doorstep. what we do is we take seawater in from the sydney harbour. they run around a series of hundreds of pipes, um, around our domestic water. so that's how we take the temperature of our domestic water down, which in turns allows us to save energy so we don't actually have to use electricity to be able to do that. we can actually use our seawater, which is one of the beauty ofjust being on the sydney harbour. being exposed to the elements has its disadvantages, especially when it comes to outdoor concerts. but the smart system is helping here too. when wind speed gets up to certain levels, it activates a safety plan, for example removing things off tables. knowing when to hold a show oran event, ora performer coming on stage. the software has helped

the house reduce its water and energy use by 20% in the last five years, and is on a mission to become carbon positive by the end of the decade. six star is normally - something you would give to a new build, rightl where you can use all of the latest technologies. but with the opera house, | you can't put a solar panel on the roof here. we're a world heritage listed building. - technology is way. ahead of theirtime. still is used today. that was original to this building, and. i that was original to this building. i and that's because its architect, jorn utzon, designed with sustainability in mind. even the tiles tails are self—cleaning. the spherical design of the structure allows for good drainage, and the only thing that washes it is the rain. every five years, each tile is manually inspected and digitally catalogued all 1,555,000 of them. that's a lot of tiles. so that's a lot of inspections that we need to do around the building. and software like this

allows us to actually strip the building down and monitor. so if i had this sort of software ten years ago, i would know that, you know, the materials i use, i'd be able to monitor the health of the building and really have a data log for, you know, when i leave the opera house, the next person who takes myjob, they'll know how i've repaired it. so this sort of information will help the longevity of the building continue. how do you tackle the challenge of retrofitting this heritage building? we feel a great sense of- responsibility to not just care for this place and to - treasure and renew this building for future _ generations, but we also talk about ourselves as custodians. you know, we all have i a temporary existence, and the time that we have as people that work- and look after this place is really significant. -

i'm at disneyland paris, where every night hundreds of drones take to the sky to entertain crowds of people looking on from below. these kinds of shows are becoming a regular feature at festivals, new year celebrations and sports events all over the world. have you ever seen a drone show in the sky and wondered, how do they do that? we're going to find out. and it's a journey that's going to take us behind the scenes of the inner workings of this theme park, and meet some of those bringing the magic to life. so for this show, we have a total of 519 drones, 500 doing standard drones and i9 drones which are carrying pyrotechnics. so smoke effects or sparklers orfountain effects, which just add a little bit of extra magic during the show. but our trip behind the scenes here started much earlier in the day, as the team get ready for the big show at the end of the night. hey, alastair, you found me.

0kay, here we are. let's go and see some magical secret stuff. so here we go. these are the drones in question. 0bviously, these ones are in the workshop. so this is where drones are. maintains all the drones that we have every night on the show. so it'sjust like a commercial aircraft almost. they they do a pre—flight check. they check the motors, they check the antennas, the communication, the lights, everything is checked. and if there's any issue with a specific drone, they just take out that drone and they put in another drone that's ready to go. the drone they use has been specially adapted for this use. it weighsjust 600g, with an led light on the front and a large antenna. the tech and the software behind it is made by french company drone source.

hi. hello. bonjour. this is the drone. and so, how do you get them to stay in the right place in the sky? well, everything is pre—programmed. we use gps. we use the wi—fi as well. we have a different way of communicating with the drones. and then you have 500 drones all moving in sync together. yes. and you have the drones that are lit on that you can see. but of course, while you have a character or a figure in the sky, some other drones are off and are travelling to their next location. how do they not crash? how do they know where to go and be in the right place? these are smart drones and these software that that we drones developed has several layers of security and intelligence. so every single drone is completely ignorant to what it has to do prior to the show. if it's placed in a specific

point on the takeoff zone, it knows it's number 312. and if that one's placed somewhere else, that's number 378. but that's their one role and that's all that they do. they take off. they do their show. the show is on every night of the year weather dependent. that's a lot of pressure that this tech is under to, to be working fully and up in the sky. absolutely. and what was developed for this show was something called hot swap. if a drone has a problem with a motor or a battery or anything that happens. so it'll either come home or it'll literally go straight down. but if it does go straight down, there's a drone that's waiting to take its place. drones are flying one metre or 50 apart, so that drone has to navigate through this sea of drones in the sky, and then parks up and takes over and runs the show in its place, which is very, very clever. this is the control room. so this is where all of the show aspects are controlled. this is michael. michael. he's the stage manager. he's in charge of all the technicians for the show.

this time of night, a lot of people start looking up at the sky because the weather is really important here. rain is a really big factor because it's in the preparation time. it takes two hours for them to install the drones, do all the checking, everything that we spoke about. then of course, there's the wind. so prior to the show we set. they send up three drones, three drones that fly up to like 110m, another one at 70 and another one at 40m. and they, each of these drones has a black box on it, just like an aircraft. the drones go up there, they take the weather, they see if there's like a gust and what the average is and what that wind speed at those different heights. and then that decision is made. the stage manager then says yes, no. and that decision is taken five minutes before the show. so we really, really try to the last moment to be able to do it really as close to the wire. weather is the big limiting factor of this kind of technology. despite that, drone

shows are fast becoming a fixture of events all around the globe. there's no denying their potential to entertain. there's a trend lately to put more drones in the shows. i you know, it's not a matter of numbers, it's really- a matter of experience. and maybe the drones tomorrow could react i to what the audience is doing. so this is something that i really want to see. - the future is endless, is all i can say, really, because, you know, we're only limited by aerospace and imagination. well, that was amazing. and with these drone shows happening all over the world now, i can't wait to see my next one. time for a look at this week's tech news. roblox has announced that it will block under 13 from directly messaging other players, unless they have permission from a verified parent or guardian. it is the most popular gaming

platform for 8 to 12 year olds in the uk, but has been urged to improve efforts to safeguard children. parents will be able to view and manage their child's account, including seeing their list of online friends and setting daily limits on playtime. a team at liverpool john moores university has created a digital avatar based on a reconstruction of richard ii's head, the english king's face has a slightly arched nose and a prominent chin. experts were also able to determine how he might have spoken by examining handwriting and the spelling of words. in medieval literature. i've determined to honour our dearest firstborn son, edward. and finally, bochy, the brown bear who had life saving brain surgery six weeks ago, is making a remarkable recovery. according to keepers at the wildwood trust, veterinary surgeons fitted a stent into bochy�*s brain.

it's to help drain excess fluid, which was believed to be causing the bear debilitating seizures. keepers say that the two year old cub is almost back to his normal self. 0h. okay, let's talk about climbing now. now, this is a sport that's gaining popularity after featuring at the olympics. i've tried it. it's fun, but it's hard. but now some of the sports enthusiasts are starting to ask about the environmental impact of their beloved activity. we spoke to two inventors based at mocean lab in berlin, which is a hard tech hub. now they're developing a new kind of climbing hold. those are those little blocks that you put yourfeet and hands in to hoist yourself up the wall. the team behind this project, which is still in its early days, says it's an eco friendly alternative to the typical

plastic climbing holds. climbers are the ones who are really trying to protect the environment. we care for nature. we want to bring sustainable alternatives for the climbing industry because it's a community that actually cares about the environment. i love climbing, it's kind of therapy for me. so it's you and the wall and that's it. hi, my name is manuela. my name is marta. even though we are architects, one of our really big passions is to climb. every time you go to the club, or even if you go outdoor climbing, you go with a group. you have this community feeling it's fun, it's someone supporting you. they're cheering you up not to fall. there's a lot of people eager to do this sport, which is amazing, but that means that a lot more gyms are opening every day. most of the equipment is relying on plastics, and this leads to a massive consumption of climbing holes, which means

there is a massive amount of plastic waste. we really want to make like a whole change in the whole industry because it's needed, and the only way to push forward is actually make it yourself. we're using mycelium that it's actually the root of mushrooms to develop a new material. mycelium in rye. and it's going to be the food that we are going to put into our substrate. 0ur secret recipe at the moment. and this is how it looks like once the mycelium has grown inside. so the way we get mushrooms into climbing halls, the whole process basically starts with taking a sample of the mushroom we want to use. we grow that in a special preparation called agar, where you let the mycelium of this mushroom grow. then you transfer this to a first substrate that is a kind of food for the mushroom.

you let it grow, you transfer this to a mould. in our case, what we are doing is we are 3d printing our moulds with either recyclable or biodegradable filament. so a small mould for a foothold. and then we're going to transfer some of our mycelium into it and let it grow. so we will put this. in our growing tent for five days and the mycelium will grow inside. and then we will have a material that it will start looking like this. you see here all the substrate is combined together with the mycelium which is the white part. and i will show you the next step, which is after letting it grow, we will heat it up and the material will turn into something like this. and you can hear now it's strong. it's hard compared

to how it was before. so now, we are going to drill some holes. so we are going to be able to put this into the wall afterwards. once you dry it out there's no problem with it. in the beginning people were a bit sceptical about this application for the materials. so that's where we come in and try to push it and show that if you have a better recipe, you can make it stronger. and then if you have a proper coating or another material to combine it with, then you can have actually a really strong material that could be applied for the climbing holes. it's not about bringing just a product, it's also making a statement that we need to do something better for the environment. and right now we have a product which is 98% made out of mycelium, which is completely bio based and can be recyclable. we are almost there to be perfect. so yeah, stay tuned because they will come out soon.

it's often said that the eyes are the window to the soul, but throw in a spot of ai and there's so much more that can be seen in them. an estimated 20 million eye tests take place in the uk every year vital for getting the right specs. but these increasingly available retinal scans could one day delve deeper into your health, too. they can already identify signs of conditions that can lead to blindness. but now research at ucl institute of ophthalmology and moorfields eye hospital is investigating whether i might help us pick up other diseases this way too. and it's created a whole new potential field of diagnostics with its own name. and this is a new term that we've coined just to describe

this ability to use the eye as a window to the rest of the body, just from looking at a retinal photograph with the retina is like the nerve tissue at the back of the eye. just from looking at that, you can predict their weight. you can predict their blood pressure. but it's even more impressive than that. there are indications that scans can predict signs of parkinson's disease. on average, seven years earlier than a regular diagnosis. i went to the doctor and i said, i don't feel very well. she sent me off to see the heart surgeon and said i had my heart done, and for a year and a half i wasted the time i could have been diagnosed. if you just keep your- forehead against the bar. angela has parkinson's. she had to wait years for a diagnosis, but if technology like this had been used, it may have been spotted earlier as she was already being treated by professor pearce for macular degeneration. what would you have been able to do differently?

i would have been able to go to speech therapy longer earlier. i'd have been able to go off and do something that i wanted to do, maybe _ go around the world, but i wouldn't go like this. um, i'mjust enjoying my life a bit better, planned it. and this is how simple a scan to potentially be able to find out all of that actually is. you'll see a bright blue light. ijust want you to look straight into that - bright blue light. so, laura, we're lookingj at your scans right here, and this looks completely healthy and normal. - these are the individual layers of the retina that we can see l at the back of the eye. the inner layers go. straight to the brain. and so often diseases that affect the brain . will turn up right here . at the front of the retina. the layers shown by this equipment are one micron thick. that's a thousandth of a millimetre. subtle changes are hard

to spot, and that's why you need a large set of data to compare. in this case, 2 million anonymized eye scans from moorfields and of course, the huge power of ai. and if other data sets are linked, then of course the possibilities could become bigger and bigger. one of the things that we've been able to do is take all the data at moorfields eye hospital, and we've been able to link it with national nhs data base data bases. and so we can see that if someone has had an eye test done in moorfields and had one of these retinal scans done, but if they've moved to grimsby and had a heart attack or moved to liverpool and had a stroke or any systemic disease, because we have this national linkage, we've got the perfect date _ set to be able to to train and develop these eye systems. if we can begin to pick up systemic diseases like this, when you go to an eye test that has massive implications for screening and prediction of disease. the team is now conducting further trials to see

whether ocular omics and the power of eye can predict strokes, heart attacks, inflammatory bowel disease, lung problems and more. how do you feel about al? i feel it's the way forward and we'd be very stupid to ignore it. i know it's got some bad press, but most of it is good press. and in a way, if it helps you get a diagnosis earlier and get the right treatment and make you sort of better, what's what's to not like. and hopefully for this sort of use, many others might agree with angela, parkinson's and the other diseases that could become identifiable like this affects so many. and early diagnosis can make a huge difference to treatment and outcome. well, that's all we've got time for this week. thanks for watching and we'll be back soon.

hello there. storm bert is bringing wet and windy weather in from the atlantic and bringing with it a triple whammy of severe weather as we head into saturday. there'll be some heavy snow for a while across parts of northern england and scotland. it'll turn to rain and with snow melt and a rapid thaw, together with some heavy rain elsewhere, there could be some flooding and it will also be very windy. the winds are picking up and temperatures are lifting overnight, but these are the temperatures by the morning. so it's still cold in scotland and northern england. and it's across these areas that we've got these amber weather warnings from the met office, snow in the morning across this part of northern england and southern scotland,

some snow to low levels, blizzards and drifting over the hills and the snow may last into the afternoon. across this part of scotland, southern highlands, there could be 30, even 40cm of snow. now the snow levels are going to rise as we introduce milder air. so the snow turning to rain and with wet weather elsewhere, there's the risk of some flooding with some heavier rain. not too much rain until later towards the south east. the rain should clear away from northern ireland in the afternoon, but it is going to be windy. widespread gales, severe gales and the strongest winds around coastal areas, particularly through the irish sea and into the north west. gusts 6070 miles an hour, but it's a southerly wind this time, which is why temperatures are going to be lifting through the day. it's going to turn very mild in northern ireland, wales and the southwest in the afternoon, and temperatures further north and east are likely to rise as we head into the night. there's storm bert lingering to the northwest of the uk. we do have this weather front bringing some more rain overnight and into sunday that will be hanging around across this part of england and wales. could be heavy rain at times closer to the storm.

this is where we've got the strongest of the winds and the more frequent showers. but it will be windy everywhere and the winds could be stronger running through the english channel as well. but again, it's going to be a mild day this time. the highest temperatures are going to be across eastern england, 15 or 16 degrees. even as we head into the beginning of next week, storm bert is going to be there across parts of scotland, maybe weakening just a little, but still bringing some very windy weather for northern areas. gusts of 50—60 miles an hour in scotland, even through the central lowlands. and we've got showers or longer spells of rain as you move further south into england and wales, it's not going to be as windy. there'll be fewer showers and more sunshine around. temperatures perhaps not quite as high. top numbers around 12 celsius.

live from washington, this is bbc news.

donald trump is preparing to return to the white house, facing a far more unsettled world than during his first term. he will inherit two major conflicts as war rages in ukraine and across the middle east. as he assembles his cabinet, we'll look at how mr trump might react to global challenges and tensions when he gets back behind this desk. hello, i'm carl nasman. weclome to this bbc special report on donald trump's foreign policy agenda. in less than two months, us presidentjoe biden's time in office will officially wrap up and donald trump will once again become commander in chief. beyond his domestic agenda, trump's second term in the white house could signal a major shift in washington's stance towards the rest

of the globe.