voice-over: 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, alasdair gets on his bike to find out how the same engineers can create the ordinary... i can feel the device giving me a boost as i cycle. and the extraordinary. no, that is not real. that cannot be real! shiona's meeting the team

trying to get pitch perfect. whistle blows yes! did that go in? replay, ref! and would you clone your pet? we meet someone who has. hi there. it is time to play a game of let's think of lots of random—sounding things and hold them all in our head at the same time. ok. you ready? yeah. 0k, think of these things. the world's fastest filming drone... mm—hm. ..a clip—on device that turns any bike electric... mm—hm. ..and a skateboard park suspended underneath a hot—air balloon. that last one really does sound random, i know, but the question is, what on earth do those things have in common? well, they've all been developed with the help of the red bull racing team, and alasdair keane's been finding out why. alasdair: when it comes to formula i, there's one team dominating the races. their sheer number of wins is hard evidence that red bull

have built something at the cutting edge of tech. but this isn't where their design innovation stops, and their other projects might surprise you. if not, they'll certainly catch your breath. this extreme bmx bowl was built with the help of red bull advanced technologies, or rbat, a spin—out from the racing team embarking on lots of different engineering projects. the thing that links them all together is taking this formula i technology and methodologies and applying it to other things, so, yeah, the common theme is the formula i tech in all of them. these are the cars that red bull racing is all about. but there are lots of bits of this tech that you can take forward into other areas. yeah, absolutely. so, you can you can look at this and you can see on the floor there, you can see some different types of carbon fibre, different weaves, and those materials we very much can carry forward through directly from the race

car into other products. you've then got sort of more specifics, like the actual aerodynamic shapes of all this complexity around here. well, it's very unlikely we'd ever take any of that and use it elsewhere, but it goes back to the tools and methodologies that we use to understand the airflow around those parts and develop those parts. this is the bmxer kriss kyle, but creating his unique skatepark isn't without challenge, and that's where rbat came in. they came to us and said, "what can we do material wise, "to make it lighter?" but also strong enough so that when it came down it didn't shatter. their initial design was steel and wood. you know, we could design it out of composites, but also you had to be able to take this apart so you can get it through a farmer's field. so there were a number of interesting structural challenges that we had to overcome. the main challenge was keeping that weight down. we had a little bit of margin with the balloon,

and i think it... i think the balloon that we've ended up manufacturing was the biggest in europe at the time. it's perhaps not a surprise, though, that some of rbat�*s projects come back to formula i. the most recent, helping to create what could be the world's fastest drone. the original brief was to be able to film the car and keep up with the car, and so that was what was done and then the footage is really impressive. and so then you start thinking, "well, how can that be used "in the future? "where do we want to go with that?" the main thing they wanted was a weight saving. and so we looked at the drones, what i call the bodywork on the outside of it, and then the sort of cruciform structure that actually holds the motor. we took those, we re—engineered them in composite materials. so i think overall we reduced the weight of the drone by about io%. and, yeah, that helped just lift that performance

of the drone to that higher level so it was able to keep up with the car. think straight line it's probably faster than the fi car. i think its biggest challenge is how you stop the drone. because it's not... it's not... it hasn't got four nice sticky tyres in contact with the ground to slow it up. so it's pretty much having to reverse the direction of the drone and fly it backwards to actually slow the drone down. and, for me, the most impressive thing there is that they're able to control the drone, flip it on its axis to slow it down, whilst still keeping the car in picture. so, you know, the pilots of the drone are incredibly impressive. but it isn'tjust the super—fast that they're working on. so this is the skarper device that we helped skarper develop, and it turns your bike into an e—bike. this little device is the creation of a start—up in london. the skarper unit has a motor, full gearbox, control- electronics, full battery pack and battery management -

technology, all built into one unit, so you simply clip this i onto your disc brake on the bicycle, - and away you go. so this is where it clips on to any bike. absolutely. this is a bog—standard, - normal bike, and i've replaced the rear disc brake l with a skarper disc. now, this is the i skarper disc brake. it looks and feels i and behaves exactly like a normal disc brake. it's a little bit thicker. at the back, and that's because it's hiding our full gearbox. l and when you want your bike to be an e—bike, you simply. open the handle, line up these metal pins with our disc, - slide it onto the disc, - close the handle, and just let it drop and click into place. and then we turn - on the unit like so... ..and you have an e—bike. and when you want it to be a normal bike, you just take it off. exactly. - and away you go. exactly. 0k, time to give it a go. i can feel the device giving me a boost as i cycle. it's not on sale yet, but with it due to cost more than £1,000, i think i'll still be relying on my own leg power when it is.

like most inventors, skarper faced challenges in creating their tech. for them, it was in the gear system, and that's where they leant on the expertise of red bull. if you imagine the geometry. and the space around the rear disc brake of a bicycle, these are really highly| conserved areas with a lot i of standards describing how they sit on a bike. we had to fit a full- gearbox into that space. that gearbox had to work - in a reliable way for thousands of kilometres and be waterproof and provide low drag, _ so really it's fitting - everything we need to do into that small space available was definitely the hardest - challenge to overcome in this project. - with such a range of extreme projects, i do wonder if they ever have to say no. i think sometimes people are shocked how much ideas are going to cost to actually bring to reality. and so that's perhaps the biggest stumbling block. the kriss kyle stunt, where he was in the bowl beneath the balloon, i mean, i remember people saying to us, "well, what did you say

when people said, "'we want you to do this?'" like, well, it doesn't feel that unusual for red bull to come up with that kind ofan idea. so no, it's never a flat no. we'll always look at it. that was alasdair. staying with sport, and data plays a huge role in tracking performance of athletes, including footballers. yeah, the problem is this technology can be quite expensive, which makes it difficult to access for the lower league teams whichjust don't have the funds. well, shiona mccallum has been to see one wearable tech start—up which is hoping to change that. shiona: when it comes to competitive sport, every team wants to be on top form. these players are no different. we're disappointed in where we are. we're a better team than 10th position, but our performances obviously haven't shown that throughout the year. so i think, you know, everyone... we're in the split now and i think our goal is to win every game that's coming our way. so i'm here to find out how technology can help this

team kick on. whistle yes! well, it's not only team spirit, but they're using a data driven wearable device to track their performance. 30,000 athletes up and down the uk are using this technology, as grass roots teams understand the importance that collecting data can have on their game. the player data gps trackers collects the team's key information... so that's them all good to go. ..from distance covered to how fast their sprints are. and the tool measures a number of data points for individual players and the full team, which helps shape decisions on the pitch. from my perspective, being able to look at it week on week and almost get like kind of...

you can get the data across a whole season. it can paint quite a solid picture and you can build on that information year in and year out. tell me, then, about how easy it is to use this technology when planning your training sessions. what i would do is i would take the units right here, make sure that they're all charged, turned on, and then we go into the app, which is the best bit about player data, and it's what this live data coming through can give you. it's in real time. so i can say to the manager, "right, 0k. "they've done... "they've already passed this threshold for this segment, "maybe we should move on to the next." and we can adjust the timings of certain parts of the session accordingly. and we can also pull out players who are doing too much or... ..or we can also tell players to maybe step up a wee bit if they're clearly not reaching the intensity required. this data—driven training programme has been embraced by the players. you can compare them with your team—mates. so a lot of people maybe

are a bit competitive and like to compare with other players and stuff like that. and how much do you enjoy looking at the data? yeah, i think it's really helpful. if you've not played as well, it's "have i actually ran as much?" sometimes you run a lot but you've actually not impacted the game. so there's maybe some training sessions where you're absolutely knackered and you can have a look and go, "well, we did run 7k, so that that explains it." so this is basically our team survey that we'd fill out. and the app also asks some personal questions too, like if the players are on their period, something that the club ceo feels is important to discuss. well, if they've had i a bad training session, why is that? it's not because maybe - theyjust can't be bothered. it's actually that they might i be in phase one of their cycle, bleeding heavily or hugely fatigued and feeling - just generally unwell. so clearly for women's teams, there's an additional benefit of opening up about all aspects of their health. but i was interested to meet the player data founder to ask some questions about the costs of these devices. tell me about how player data

then has become an accessible and affordable piece of technology for grassroots teams. so we spent a lot of time building a product completely dedicated to this segment of the market. we built a subscription model that aligns ourselves with how club finances work. so clubs just pay us monthly, like netflix, basically, but for your sports data. hi, dylan. hi. how's it going? how's the training? yeah, yeah, it's going well so far. what we're looking for today is exactly how much high intensity running that they're going to do. so right now we're looking at, you know, average of 15m for sprints, which is actually quite a lot. and we can drill into each individual player as well. yes, of course. so we're looking at caley, for example. look at all her stats so far. we can see, ok, so she's falling behind a wee bit now, but we expect that to pick up as the session progresses. so that has always been the aim for this session and it's always nice to see her come

through so you know that it's working. there are loads of sporting tracking tools on the market, but finding the best one for your needs could make all the difference, no matter the environment. time for a look at this week's tech news. the boss of whatsapp has told the bbc that tens of millions of people are using technical workarounds to secretly access whatsapp in countries where it's banned. like many western apps, whatsapp is banned in iran, north korea and syria. and last month, china joined the list of those banning users from accessing the secure platform. but whatsapp knows where its users truly are, thanks to their registered phone numbers. what we can most do is look at some of the countries that are blocked and see still see, you know, worldwide, tens of millions of people connecting to whatsapp be it by a proxy or vpns or other ways they use to get around it. as of this week, the makers of smart devices in the uk can

no longer sell products that allow the use of weak, easy—to—guess passwords, such as "admin" or "i,2,3,4,5." nope. i haven't use any of them. it's part of the new law designed to protect consumers from hacking and cyber attacks. the rules cover every smart device that comes with internet or network connectivity, from tvs to smart doorbells. the grand final of one of the world's biggest gaming competitions took place in birmingham this week. 15,000 fans watched top—flight players at the esl one grand final, battling it out for $300,000 prize. team falcon beat rivals betboom in a clean sweep. joe: the 2africa subsea internet cable is the largest ever built. a5,000km long, it stretches all the way around the continent. it promises to bring a huge boost in internet capacity and resilience to billions of people in africa and beyond.

in calais, france, a team is preparing to set sail to lay the next section of the line. and this is what 2africa, and all subsea internet cables, look like — about the same width as a garden hose and, inside, protected by that plastic coating, there's all these really thin optical fibres. and it's on these that your emails and social media posts travel under the oceans, around the world at the speed of light. it's subsea cables like these that have helped the world get connected in recent years. 70% of us are now online. but it's expensive and high—stakes stuff. 0ne break of the cable or tangle of the wires can cost millions to repair. 0nce they're installed, a lot can go wrong, too. in march, internet connectivity to 13 african countries was badly disrupted after lines were severed by a suspected giant underwater landslide. breakages are common, but thanks to a sophisticated

system of re—routing, most of the time we don't really notice. however, the bigger threat to internet connectivity comes from governments themselves. organisations like top10vpn track deliberate internet shutdowns. last year, researchers say, was the worst on record, with countries, particularly india, routinely switching off connectivity for everything from preventing cheating in exams to stifling unrest. internet shutdowns, it's like this blanket censorship. you are controlling and stopping information flows for an entire population or community, which, in some contexts, like in situations of armed conflict or war, it can be fatal. you know, there are all sorts of economic, social, civil and political rights that are severely impacted. lives online are also being controlled in a less obvious way. this map is freedom house's latest index of freedom online. the redder countries are less

free and the bluer ones are most free, based on censorship, surveillance and how many websites are blocked. recently, iran and myanmar have declined the most, with china remaining the worst online environment, according to researchers. globally, they say internet freedom has declined 13 years in a row. experts say the trend is only going in one direction because tools for internet control have become abundant, and governments are far less squeamish about using them. the idea that the internet is a global space, that is a commons that is...or, you know, it's a public good or commons or some combination that's going to be beyond the reach of governments to control, it's going to be the same everywhere — you know, that was always a bit of a fantasy, but it also was sort of this knee jerk libertarianism that was based on an incorrect understanding of how the technology actually works. geopolitics, too, is

threatening the status quo in unlikely places. the us, one of the champions of the open internet, is taking the unprecedented move of banning one of the world's most popular apps, tiktok, due to security fears about the chinese—owned company. so, even as incredible feats of engineering are helping to connect us, the internet is more splintered and fractured than ever before. now, cast your mind back to 1996, if you can. do you remember the buzz that there was around the fact that scientists had created dolly the sheep, the world's first mammal cloned from an adult cell? nearly three decades on and cloning technology has come a long way. in some countries, you can even clone your pet, as stephanie hegarty tells us. stephanie: half a billion people around the world have a dog or a cat at home. i'm one of them. and this is my dog, zeus.

and anyone who has a pet understands the special bond that we have with them. they're part of the family. but we know that sooner or later, we're going to have to say goodbye to them. they don't live as long as we do. but what if you didn't have to? what if you could clone your pet? it was back in 1996 that we learned that scientists in the uk had cloned the first mammal from an adult cell — dolly the sheep. and people were shocked and stunned. it was like something from a sci fi film. but in the past 20 years, this technology has moved on so much it's become accessible. although the costs are high — about $50,000. people can now clone animals from livestock to show horses, racehorses and even cats and dogs. it's now possible, from just a small tissue sample, to clone a dog like zeus. austin, texas, is home to one of america's largest cell storage facilities for pet cloning. it's also the home of a young pet owner whose beloved cat,

chai, died seven years ago. this is belle, and my name is kelly, and i cloned my cat. a lot of people think that i wanted to bring my cat back from the dead, but that really was not the case at all. ijust wanted to carry on a piece of my cat. i am not rich by any means. i'm a broke dog trainer, so i took out a loan to clone belle. cloned animals are essentially genetic twins to their original. like human twins, they can look different. it all depends on how they develop in the womb. even their fur pattern can be different. their temperament is the exact same. so they're both bold, sassy, bossy cats with attitude, but their markings are actually different. i really wanted to be careful in the fact that i treated belle as an individual, and not as just a copy of my other cat. cloning for non—scientific purposes is banned in the uk and in the eu. there have been concerns about the health of cloned animals, but the first

essential step of cloning an animal, tissue cultivation and storage, is allowed here. samples for genetic preservation and cloning are mainly taken in the uk and europe after the animal has passed away, and the first process we do once the samples arrive with us is we preserve the dna to store it indefinitely for the owner, so that they can bring those skin samples back to life when they want to think about cloning. to clone an animal, all we actually need is one of these little piles of skin here. i will place one of these piles of skin into each of these vials. they contain our special freezing media, which is really key to this process of being able to freeze the samples down to —196 and retain the integrity of the dna to be able to create living cells from them in the future. the second stage is the cell culture, and that's where we try and replicate the individual cells that make up the skin sample. so the client has cultured cells ready to move on to the stage of cloning.

when the owner is ready to clone, we ship the samples to the usa for them. and that's where the actual cloning takes place. cloning animals is a multi—million—dollar industry and growing, but it's banned in a lot of countries, and cloning today mostly happens in the us, china and south korea. the first step of cloning - is enucleation, so what you would do is you would take eggs from some females . and you would denucleate the eggs, turn them - into a blank egg. the second step in cloning is reconstruction. - you would take one cell. from the animal you want to clone and insert it right into that blank egg. - the third step is - fusion and activation. that kind of mimics what an egg and sperm would do, that - day zero embryo. once that's done, the eggs get transferred into our surrogates| and the surrogate will have the babies naturally. - clones are very similar to the original animal, j

but there are some epigenetic factors. | for example, an environment, l what they eat, what experiences this new clone is going - to have, that could make it a little different i than the original. how these technologies can be used for, obviously, conservation and the way that we can freeze cells down in order to be able to bring them back to life in 10, 20 or 1,000 years' time quite often comes back to these very same technologies. if you've preserved these genetics and you can clone some of these species back, you can actually help a species that could be on the brink of extinction and hopefully stop that particular species from disappearing. it's been 28 years since dolly the sheep was born and animal cloning is still controversial. even now, the success rate of a cloned embryo is relatively low, which raises ethical concerns about the wellbeing of donors and surrogates, as complications during the cloning process can cause pain and suffering to the animals involved. so would i clone zeus?

i mean, the idea of having to say goodbye to him one day is heartbreaking, but realistically, could there ever be another zeus? that was stephanie. and that raises so many questions for me. so many questions. oh, it's a lot. it's a different dog, though. it is a different dog. i think it would be a different dog. yes, i think, in the end. anyway, that's it from us. thank you very much for watching and we'll see you soon. bye. hello, there. our settled week of weather is set to continue. in fact, thursday, it was warmest day of the year so far.

we reached a high of 24.6 celsius in st james's park, london. when you round that up to 25, that is 77 fahrenheit. we could see similar values over the next couple of days with high pressure staying with us, but this weak weather front will continue to bring some showery outbreaks of rain and a cooler feel across the northern isles. it'll be a relatively mild start to our friday morning. double digits, some early morning mist and fog quickly melting away, a lot of sunshine coming through. we'll get a little bit of fair weather cloud developing into the afternoon, but on the whole, a promising day. more sunshine as well for scotland in comparison to thursday. top temperatures here of 20 to 22 degrees. we could see 2a further south. into the start of the weekend, we continue with this warm, sunny theme. however, the risk of some sharp showers will start to increase. now, as we go through the early hours of saturday morning, we could see some fog coming in off the north sea, anywhere from the vale of york down into lincolnshire, over into the southeast.

again, double figures to greet us first thing on saturday morning. so, could be a pretty murky start across eastern england, but we'll expect that sunshine to get to work — it's quite strong at this time of year. a lot of sunshine coming through. risk of a few scattered showers anywhere north of manchester, up to the scottish borders, but top temperatures generally at around 23 or 2a celsius once again. now, as we move into sunday, we've got this weather front which will enhance the risk of some sharp, thundery downpours and some showers moving up from the near continent. now, if we get some sunshine across east anglia and south east england, we could see temperatures as high as 26 degrees. a lot of uncertainty about the detail for sunday, but at the moment, there's a greater chance of seeing some sharp thundery, downpours developing. and so out to the west, not quite as warm. then into monday, an atlantic influence is set to return, low pressure will start to push in from the west as the high drifts away, and that means that it will turn

wetter and windier. and that is going to stay with us throughout the week, so it looks likely to see showers or longer spells of rain returning.

live from washington. this is bbc news. israel's prime minister says he will press ahead with military operations alone if necessary, as the white house calls for restraint. amid mounting concerns over boeing's safety record, we ask the us transportation secretary what the biden administration is doing to keep planes safe. we already have been in the process of putting going under a microscope ever since the january alaska airlines flight. they need to demonstrate our meeting the quality stands and safety standards that has been set forward. hello i'm caitriona perry. you are very welcome. israel's prime minister, benjamin netanyahu, has vowed to press ahead with military operations in the gaza strip,