i think building the chair around you and your needs is incredibly important. and we whip up a chat with the new voice and face of indiana jones. the thing that is universal is that there is, somewhere in all of us, an adventurer. so, this is the velodrome? this is it, this is where i spent 20 years of my life. i've raced the commonwealth games here in 2002, world champs in �*96, 2000, 2008. i've become world champion here, commonwealth champion. yeah, loads of great memories. but also my place of work. i used to come here five days a week, you know, 50 weeks of the year. so it's... so many memories, so many people, so many friendships. so, yeah, always have a nice, warm feeling when i come back to the velodrome.

it's a big commitment, being a champion? it is, but at the heart of it, you're doing something you love, you know? it's a passion. and it... when i was 13—14 and i first rode on the track at meadowbank, in edinburgh, never could've thought that one day, you know, it'd become a careerfor me and i would go on to win lots of medals. it's that passion and determination that's helped take sir chris hoy to the top of the podium many times, at both the olympics and world championships. in his career spanning many years, he's seen technology shift in his sport. obviously, the bikes evolve and the science behind performance and the analysis and... aerodynamics is the biggest one that's evolved cycling over the last ten years. but at the heart of it, it's human beings and it's personalities and it's passion for sport. and i love the science, don't get me wrong.

i mean, i did my degree in sports science and i love the science, the underpinning theory behind performance. but aside from all that, it's the human element that is the most fascinating, i think — the psychology. and, yeah, as i said, the passion for sport. sir chris has described this year as his toughest. he's spoken openly about his health and terminal cancer diagnosis. but through it all, he's continued working, including backing a clip—on bit of tech that can make any bike an e—bike. this has been a huge project, you know, over the last four years, but more than ever, it's great to have something exciting to look forward to. i mean, you are sir chris hoy. you are known for cycling under your own power. people might be surprised that you're backing an e—bike. yeah, i — to be brutally honest, when i very first... like, 15 years ago, when i heard about e—bikes, i remember thinking, you know, "the whole point of cycling

is you're using your body to propel the bike. surely that's the point of it? it's exercise, it's good for your legs and your lungs." and then i tried an e—bike the very first time, and i got it. it's not like sitting on a scooter and turning a throttle and you're a passenger. an e—bike is a pedal assist. and they're very different to the bikes that you might see delivering pizzas or whatever up and down high streets. that's a very different thing altogether. these are pedal assist. they�* re regulated to 16mph. you know, they're safe. these are a very different proposition. but when you ride one, you get it. you go, "actually, you still have to pedal. you still get exercise." but you can choose how much effort you want to put through the pedals. so, if you do want, you know, to work a bit harder, you can. but if you don't, you get that extra little boost. so i think it makes people want to ride their bikes more frequently. athlete investing is now a huge trend in all sorts of different products and technology. what is your involvement in this? are you just a kind of famous name behind a product, or are you more involved?

i think — well, i was there, i was the first person to get on board and to become a shareholder and to back it — because i believed in it, you know? when you get on the bike and you try it, it is a eureka moment. and i thought, "this is going to be huge." i feel as well i've played a small role in developing the characteristic of how the unit works, and giving feedback from a cyclist�*s perspective on the different power modes, on, you know, the shape of it, the clearance — all the things that are actually important in terms of the cycling experience. i've tried to help them with that. wahey! we're in a velodrome, which is of course where you competed and raced and trained all that time. the world of technology is also changing sport. do you still recognise cycling as it was when you were competing in places like this? oh, 100%. i mean, i think science —

well, it's certainly helped my career, and probably it was the steepest part of the learning curve, because when i first started cycling seriously, things were very... you know, it was very old—fashioned and it was a very traditional sport. but technology has revolutionised the sport. and ifind it fascinating — and i embrace it, too. i love the data. i used to love the data when i was riding. and i loved the numbers. and i could finish a session knowing that i'd produced a new personal best. a lot of the big nations, you know, they had an advantage with big budgets, professional teams. but now i think, yeah, a talented individual can compete at the top level because there's so many things you can buy to help you assess your performance and make the right training choices. but again, ultimately, it comes down to that individual and how hard they can turn those pedals. it's as simple as that. and that kind of information can also be available to fans, and it increases people's watching of the sport, too. yeah, so, yeah, one of the... that's a really good point. a lot of the new races now, the riders will have their, you know, heart monitor on, they have power cranks on. and the real—time data can be projected onto apps. so the fans can watch the athletes and see. and you look at these athletes

walking onto the track and sitting there looking confident and composed. and you think, "0h, he looks completely relaxed." and you look at his heart rate and think, "he's bluffing." you know, it's fascinating — the insights you can get. sport will always be about people. and you can have all the assistance, you can have all the analysis and everything that goes with it — i think that's great because it moves the sport on — but at the heart of it, you still have to have a person who can step up on that line, deal with the nerves, decide how they're going to race and actually finish thejob off, if you like. you can go so far, but you need that human element to do the last bit. this is melanie woods. a 30—year—old wheelchair racer and paralympian from scotland. i started racing maybe

about five years ago. i was unfortunately in an accident where i suffered a spinal injury, which meant that i was now a wheelchair user. and at that point, i was kind of looking at sport and thinking, you know, what would it look like for me now? melanie had been a pe teacher before she was hit by a car whilst out cycling, leaving her paralysed from the waist down. but her background in sport spurred on a determination to get active again, so she joined a local athletics club. when i first started, i was... yeah, absolutely no talent or superstar. in fact, it was really difficult to even get around one lap of the track. since 2018, melanie has competed at two paralympic games and several world championships, putting her in a unique place to inform new research from loughborough university. the team are using a wind tunnel to test the aerodynamics of wheelchair racing. one key area is an athlete's body position in their chairs while racing.

we have beside me a wind tunnel and the working section with a wheelchair mounted to it. so, it's mounted to what we call a balance. so it's essentially like a giant set of weighing scales, but instead ofjust weighing up and down like the scales you have at home, it'll measure forwards and backwards, side to side, as well as up and down. so it allows us to measure all of the forces that are acting on that chair when we turn the wind on. so, what kind of things will mel be doing in the wind tunnel? if we see an athlete in motion, of course, it's dynamic, they're not holding particular positions. but in order for us to match it up with some computer simulations, we choose three positions. so we have catch, release and recovery, which are three key parts of the driving motion that a wheelchair athlete would be performing as part of their propulsion.

we've identified those three as key for drag. so, by asking mel to hold those positions, we're able to get really repeatable measurements. melanie is performing the catch pose here — a snapshot of how she would look when pushing her chair�*s wheels during a race. dan and his team must find out whether this green outline of mel's body matches that in the 3d simulations. when a wheelchair athlete is racing, the biggest force that they're going to encounter is that wind resistance. so, we can feel this ourselves on a windy day and we can feel the force that we have to put in to overcome that. so, for us, it's really important to understand how that force — where that force comes from and any changes that we can make to try and reduce that force, and allow the athlete to ultimately perform faster. the project is the work of phd student will dixon, who's showing me just how wind hits melanie�*s body and chair. if i bring it down, see how it attaches over her helmet? i and then where it's really flapping about, that's - where there's - lots of turbulence. so that's where it's - separating from her body. if i bring it, like, across — like, close to her arm — l you can see that it's| attached to her arm. but then behind there, i it's shedding and there's lots of wake, a lot - of turbulence and that.

my backgrounds in vehicle aerodynamics, and actually a vehicle... once we've designed those surfaces, it's the same whether you're driving it or i'm driving it. it performs the same aerodynamically. wheelchair racing and cycling and many sports are completely different, so we work with wheelchair manufacturers to allow development of the equipment itself. but also, we can inform the athlete to hold a slightly different position or even just update. if they have a preferred position, we can tell them what that costs, actually, in terms of track time and aerodynamic drag. some of the data gathered will apply to melanie only, but the idea is to gather as much information in how to realistically position an athlete in the catch, release and recovery positions, ultimately broadening the knowledge of wheelchair racing. there's so little research into our sport, and i think that can limit the development of us moving forward

with technology and getting faster. the position that you're in in the chair is, like, the most significant part, and i think building the chair around you and your needs is incredibly important. it will take months before results from the project are fully analysed, but dan tells me the preliminary findings are positive and that those three key positions could provide a framework to helping athletes get faster in their sport. the research that they're doing into the aerodynamics and how your position affects that will hopefully help them come out with some kind of guidelines or some influence on what position you choose to be in. and i think, yeah, that'll be really helpful. time for a look at this week's tech news. google has unveiled a new chip called willow, which it claims takes five minutes to solve a problem that would currently take the world's fastest supercomputers ten septillion years to complete.

the chip is the latest development in a field known as quantum computing, where principles of particle physics are used to create an incredibly powerful computer. normally, computers are operating on the boolean logic of zeros and ones. and when a computer replaces this logic with the laws of quantum physics, as a result, you get a more powerful set of operations. however, experts say that willow is a largely experiment will device — meaning a quantum computer powerful enough to solve a wide range of real—world problems is still years away. the world's first commercial production of carbon fibre enriched with graphene will be led by a uk company in saudi arabia. scientists describe graphene as a nano—material which is about 200 times stronger than steel. it's hoped it'll it'll be used to build eco—cities in the desert. and finally, tesla's optimus humanoid robot has been out for a walk this week — and even managed to avoid a fall after a little slip on a steep slope. artificial intelligence is set to transform our workplaces. but how ready is our workforce for this rapidly changing technology? and what impact will it have onjobs right now and jobs in the future? on one hand, some commentators believe it will simply wipe out

many roles, while others believe it will revolutionise the way that we work. to find out more, i've been meeting people working in different fields of ai. hi, i'm teo, and i'm an ai prompt engineer at autogenai. prompt engineering is finding a way to communicate with al models using natural language. it's a way for everyone to be able to talk to ai, and it means that it's accessible to everybody. so, autogenai builds a solution using linguistic engineering and machine learning for people who are writing bids, tenders and proposals.

some people have referred to ai in very grandiose terms, saying it's almost like it's an industrial revolution, you know? i mean, do you feel that it's going to have that level of impact on roles? i do think it will have that big of an impact. it's changing the way we communicate with each other. it's changing the way that we think about things. it's changing our entire process. i think that al won't take your job, but somebody who knows how to use ai might take yourjob. i think we've really got to learn how to use these tools, and if we stay behind the curve, then we will get left behind. this is the london office of google deepmind. william isaac is a principal scientist here. he focuses on the field of ai ethics. ai, it will have the capacity

to have a kind of... transformative both in innovation and kind of economic impacts, you know? but for the individuals, i think we're going to see a spectrum. and we'll see areas where, you know, we'll have ai kind of augment existing tasks and really kind of, you know, take away some of the areas that people just find a bit like drudgery right now. but then there'll be other areas where it'll be empowering, there will be areas where it will help kind of enhance your ability to do things well. i think the most important part is that there's a dialogue about it. william believes the ultimate goal is an ai which is safe, useful and able to represent everyone. what's the ethics behind building ai models which maybe just reflect our own biases, our own political beliefs, our own social beliefs? ideally, you want ai systems that are representative — just full stop — that they are able to actually represent a range of views — and by default, they do. they are trained on the internet and the data that's underneath it, and it

can actually represent a range of views. i'm matthew schwartz. i'm a principal security engineer for amazon web services' generative ai red team. for others working in al, they are troublemakers. myjob is to break amazon's generative ai technologies so real—world attackers can't. is it like ethical hacking? would that be a way to describe it? you definitely could call it ethical hacking. amazon pays myself and a number of other members on the team to try and compromise our systems before they go out. i use alto assist me in many of the tasks that i do. to me, it's really refreshing to oversee a new technology that's rapidly evolving. does that give us some challenges? yes — but that's also the exciting part, right? the exciting part is, how do i test this new technology? so, are we preparing our workforce for this changing landscape? i'm mirella lapata. i'm a professor of natural language processing - at the school of informatics i

at the university of edinburgh. all kids at every school - in the whole country should at least know to - program a little bit. they would need to understand what the technology can - and cannot do. ai is not going i to steal ourjobs. we have to work with ai| to make ourjobs better. but right now, the problem is there is a mismatch. - there is al and there is the currentjobs, l and they are not going together. i a lot of people say that, - you know, it will revolutionise the workplace. the reality is that it hasn't. yet and it will not be instant. ai in the workplace will take a little bit of time, - and there is good reasons for this. i first of all, ai is not cheap. and then you have the actual. people who used to do the job, and now they're supposed to do it with al. _ they don't know how to do this. they need to be trained. how do we prepare people for these new emerging jobs in aland in technology? at the moment, we don't have enough ai experts. i

so please do study computer science. | that's what you need to do. or study ethics, or study law. these are important professions| and will become more important as ai matures and is - adopted more and more. and i would definitely. not discourage people. this is a very exciting field. you get to play with cool . technology and influence it and, in fact, in the end, i possibly change the world. joel from the last of us, bookerfrom bioshock infinite, and samuel drake from uncharted. three massive video game characters, one thing in common — they're all played by the same actor, troy baker. now he's adding one more, and possibly the most iconic of them all — indiana jones. regardless of your familiarity with this character or this ip,

the thing that is universal is that there is, somewhere in all of us, an adventurer. and that is something that everybody can relate to. and what all of us have tried to make over the last almost four years of making this game is something that speaks to that adventurous spirit. our whole thing is turning you into indiana jones, to bring out the adventurer in you. we have to make haste. ijust saw father ventura with a blackshirt on his way to the castello. people will have probably worked it out from the hat and from the jacket, but you are playing indiana jones. what's it like stepping into such an iconic role? i actually brought this from home, by the way. this is mine. it's going to sound so cheesy, but it's the truth. it's truly a dream come true. i said, "who is father ventura?" we call him the man in black. a friend of mussolini. before i ever even thought about being an actor or working in games, this is a character

that i've looked up to my whole life. and so — so much so that i thought it was impossible for me to play it, because when i was offered the role, i was like, "no," and i turned it down because i was scared. indiana jones and the great circle tells a new story for indy — on pc and xbox first. a playstation 5 version's coming out next year — something microsoft originally said wouldn't happen. and, while it might look like harrison ford here, the voice and face and body movements are all troy's. how do you see the landscape as being different now from when you first started? i think that there are more opportunities for more actors from all walks to be in this. and the reason why i love games is because, again, it's this partnership between the player and the actor — we both get to inhabit this role. and i believe that these are empathy machines.

i believe that there is... there's nothing like thinking about a character, and then i can watch that character and they can have this beautiful, dramatic, emotive moment, and then all of a sudden, i move that left stick and that character moves. and now i have agency and control in what they're doing in this environment — in my choice! this is the evolution of the story, is, how can i let you know what my experience has been? and if i can tell you what my experience is — and more so, you can experience what my experience has been — well, now we have empathy. and i think that if we were able to walk in each other�*s shoesjust a little bit, might be a little bit kinder. it sounds, you know, sunshine and rainbows, but i think the world would be a better place. actors have never played more of a role bringing their virtual characters to life, and big global

launches are so big now, they can make stars of their heroes and villains. this time, that includes marios gavrilis and his new villain, voss. sin! part of my work was to create a new character from scratch but at the same time remain in the context and the tone of the realm of indiana jones. it's not rocket science. you can't reinvent the thing, right? you have to kind of match the tone of it. but it was a lot of fun, man, i can tell you that. you know, very often, we're referred to as voice actors. what we're actually doing with the p—cap thing is full—on acting. this is something people forget. like, we're notjust doing the voice — it's the entire body, it's the entire... it's the entirety of our performance that's being captured. what do you make of this kind

of movement for actors in games having much more of a celebrity status than they might have in the past? you've got to understand, this is a big industry. so, somebody like troy baker, he is up there — deservedly so. so, he built up his credits over the years, you know, playing some of the most remarkable characters in gaming history. this whole celebrity thing... kind of like proof of concept is that they're asking a—listers from hollywood, "play in games" — norman reedus and keanu reeves, all these guys. it's no coincidence. i think the gaming market has huge potential, and this isjust the beginning. and that's it from indy and from us for this week. thanks for watching and we will see you soon. nice view.

after the overnight rain across england and wales, hello. after the overnight rain across england and wales, thursday promises to bring lengthy spells of sunshine. it'll be a little on the chilly side, particularly across the north of the uk with a noticeable breeze, but overall, not a bad day. now, here's the satellite picture of that weather system earlier on, spreading across the uk. the rain has been mostly across the southern half of the country — in the north, we've had showers and clear spells. by the middle of thursday, that weather front is way towards the east of us — and in its wake, we're in that north westerly airstream. so, this is what it looks like early in the morning — still the remnants of the rain there across east anglia, but 1—2 showers also further towards the west. frost—free for england and wales, typically five celsius, closer to freezing in northern ireland and scotland. so here's that weather, then, on thursday — sunshine, particularly across eastern and central england, but notice a few showers in scotland, and 1—2 elsewhere. but on the whole, a fine day. the temperatures — around eight for cardiff and for london, about that for liverpool. in edinburgh and belfast, it'll be a shade cooler than that. and then, friday, we're expecting more rain to sweep in.

this next weather front crosses the country — middle of the day, it'll be in central areas of england. gusty winds for a time, too, before it clears away and the skies turn clear, as well. now, let's have a look at the forecast for the weekend, because it will be very blustery. a nasty area of low pressure is expected to sweep just to the north of us — it'll introduce really strong winds to northern and western scotland, and really blustery elsewhere. 60—70mph gusts there in the north of scotland, 50mph across many central parts of the uk. the temperatures may reach 12—13 in some spots — but, because it'll be windy and there'll be showers, some of them wintry over the hills, it won't feel particularly warm. and it's notjust saturday that'll be windy, another very blustery day on sunday to come — look at that, gusts approaching 50mph further south, too. but it will be colder on sunday, you really will feel that wind chill. those temperatures will dip to six celsius — add on those 40—50mph gusts, and you'll need your thick coats. now, here's christmas week — it turns out that christmas day will be about the mildest day, but it is going to be generally settled. bye— bye.

live from singapore, this is bbc news. the de facto leader of syria tells the bbc his country is not a threat to the world in one of his first tv interviews with western media. north korea hits back at ukraine and the us over criticism of their deployment of troops in russia. hundreds have been killed or injured. in an exclusive special report, the bbc goes on patrol with kenyan police in haiti as they deal with escalating gang violence — we speak with one of the country's most notorious gang leaders.

welcome to newsday. i'm katie silver. the head of the rebel group which now controls large parts of syria has told the bbc the country is exhausted by war, and poses no threat. the un estimates 100,000 refugees have already returned to the country. ahmed al—sharaa said western sanctions had to be lifted for more syrians to come back. in one of his first television interviews since his forces toppled president assad two weeks ago, ahmed al—sharaa also called for the west to stop designating his group, hayat tahrir al—sham or hts, as a terrorist organisation. hts, which split from al-qaeda in 2016, says it is no longer a jihadist or extremist group. he says they do not target civilians, and consider themselves victims of the assad regime.

our international editor, jeremy bowen,