Wants to go electric, but some vehicles are easier to electrify than others. While the tech world is going mad for electric cars, bigger vehicles are proving more difficult. The bigger and heavier they are, the bigger and heavier the batteries need to be. More than a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions from road transport in the eu comes from heavy duty vehicles. And because nearly everything we eat, drink and where will have been in a big truck at some point, the cleaner, greener future is going to need cleaner, greener haulage. And some manufacturers are pushing on with the switch to electric, as alasdair keane has been finding out. There are millions of heavy goods trucks driving on roads all over the world. But why are so few of them running on electricity? to find out, we are near sweden's capital, home to one of europe's biggest truck manufacturers. They are on the long road to changing an industry that is having a big impact on our planet. This is the largest change our industry has over a hundred years. When we went from horses to vehicles actually. Now trundling off the end of the production line is an increasing number of electric trucks. And scania eventually wants that to be every vehicle they make. Switching to electric production has not been easy. One of the biggest challenges is the weight of the batteries. They had to reinforce the concrete and bring in new equipment to be able to lift them, and that meant closing down the production line for three months. There are several thousand new components in the electric vehicles, and they are also, what was very important during this time, was reskilling our workforce, so they could be able also to work on electric vehicles just as they do on internal combustion engines. This move to electric tracking is going at a very slow pace. So what motivates a company to make such a big gearshift? welcome on board. Nice to meet you. I am hitching a lift with the man with the keys to this organisation. This company has been part of the problem for 130 years almost, a long time producing those trucks that were emitting the emissions that were not good for the planet. Is there guilt behind the change? yeah, i think there is guilt, there is the notion that we want to be able to see our kids and grandchildren in the eyes and say we knew it and we chose to do something about it. Instead ofjust trying to continue to optimise profits and do the things that companies do. And there is also a notion of coming early to the insight that this is the future competitiveness. If you are last into this journey you will have a problem to compete because at some point everyone will understand, and that has been really important because you have to have that as a company, when you are to convince your supervisory board, your owners and everyone around you in the ecosystem that you need to walk down this path. Not only did scania stop output for several months, they also built this battery plant next to where the trucks are assembled. We are in one of the most high tech parts of the site where lots of robots are assembling the batteries that will end up in the trucks. It is quite mesmerising to watch. These batteries weigh an incredible 4,000kg. That presents lots of challenges for those driving them. There are still lots of questions though about using battery electric. Is it powerful enough to move these heavy trucks? is there the charging infrastructure to get them where they need to go and at three times the cost of a normal truck, are they a sound investment that companies will get their money back on? and part of the debate has also been about other ways to power trucks, with some in the industry suggesting hydrogen fuel cells are the best solution for green trucking. Battery electric is the most cost efficient, so therefore we believe in this, and also it is possible to build infrastructure and everything around it. Shall we go for a ride? i think we should, let's do it. It is completely silent. And it is strong, the torque is amazing. You must still have a hard time convincing drivers to make the switch. There is a lot of scepticism, i am travelling a lot in myjob and i was in finland a couple of weeks ago, which i would have expected to be a market ready to transition quickly. But huge scepticism. Will this really work? can it stand the temperatures of northern finland, the home of. . . Of santa claus, really cold, really tough drives, really high vehicle weights, and i understand that. We need to take that on, with facts, and the best way to convince customers is as always when something is new, and this is a very traditional industry, we are used to that, but when there is something new, let them test. By 2030, scania wants half the trucks they sell to be electric, and fully battery operated by 2050, but that is still a long way off. I certainly think this journey could be much accelerated if the legislature would be more active in supporting the change. This is our biggest challenge now. The vehicle is here. What we sit in now is 40—tonner, it is european long haulage but we are also supplying 60, 64, 74 and 80—tonners. We have spent a lot of time in brussels, in stockholm and berlin to try and convince politicians that this is a good thing, this is notjust for the environment, it is also great driver environment. The road to green trucking is slow. There is still a lot of work to do for manufacturers across the industry trying to convince buyers to make the switch. That was alasdair. And now from heavy goods vehicles to something more nimble. In some parts of the world, scooters have already gone electric, with lightweight bikes and hot swappable batteries making a lot of sense. But even the e—scooter is taking a while to reach everyone. In the meantime nikhil inamdar has been to india to see a bike powered by compressed natural gas. 215 million. That is the number of two—wheelers on india's roads, emitting harmful pollutants that are adding to the worsening air quality of its cities. But one company now claims it has a solution. This is bajaj auto's freedom, the world's first motorbike that runs on compressed natural gas, or cng. It is basically a gas that is compressed and stored in a cylinder. And it is both cleaner and cheaper than other automobile fuels like petrol or diesel. But cars, trucks and even tuk—tuks have used cng for long but mounting this tank on a two—wheeler has taken years of trial and error. What have been the challenges of this bike? the motorcycle has a very little space. A cng cylinder big, it is heavy and it is of a certain shape. So that has to be integrated and designed to take care of that. Just to quickly show you, this is a 2kg cng cylinder weighs 15 kg, which has been packed into this bike. So you can see how large this is. Along with this, to give the customer reassurance that the customer will never be stranded, there is an auxiliary fuel tank which is right over here, which is another two litres. Bajaj claims using this fuel effectively halves the running cost of the motorbike, and dramatically reduces emissions of several harmful greenhouse gases. But, despite being fuelled by cng, this does feel like riding any other bike. The big question and everybody�*s mind is really the timing of the launch, because this has come into the market when we are all on the cusp of that big ev revolution. The indian government wants 80% of all two—wheelers on its roads to be electric by 2030. Is that a problem? i am still saying an electric motorcycle itself today is impossible. I caught up with someone who reviews bikes for a living. Do you think evs will pose a threat to cng bikes in the next few years? i think we are too large a country for things to pose a threat to others. I have heard about how. . . Where is the capacity in terms of power, in terms of battery manufacturing, in terms of sales and manufacturing, who will sell them, where is the infrastructure? it is a cascade of things that have to fall into place first. We are moving in that direction but i can very easily argue we are not moving fast enough to meet that goal. But there might be more immediate challenges. Long lines like these of cng—run tuk—tuks and taxis are regular site at india's gas stations. For these new bikes to hit the fast lane, fixing these infrastructure gaps will be critical. Time for a look at this week's tech news. The uk government has asked phone companies to do their bit in its quest to reduce rising snatch thefts. It wants the manufacturers to make sure the stolen devices can quickly and permanently be disabled so they cannot be reregistered for sale on the second—hand market. Telegram has apologised to south korean authorities for its handling of deepfake pornographic material shared using its messaging app. It says it has removed 25 sexually explicit deepfakes from the platform. This follows the discovery of many chat rooms containing such videos, causing outrage in south korea and the start of an investigation into telegram by its police force. Clearview ai has been fined over 30 million euros by the dutch data protection authority. The dpa says clearview scrapes photos from the internet and converts them into biometric data without knowledge or consent of the person in the photograph. Clearview ai says the decision is unlawful and they do not have a place of business or customers in the netherlands or the rest of the eu. Also in the netherlands, it is claimed that this is the world's strongest land—based crane. It is said to be able to lift up to 6000 tons. Rats and mice. To some, cute, cuddly pets. To others, a pest that needs to be controlled. In the uk, reports of rat infestations are at an all—time high. With rodents causing record levels of damage to homes, businesses and even cars. I went along to see how the world's largest pest control company, rentokil, are using tech to fight back. Don't worry, no rodents were harmed during the making of this film. Send in the ai. Well, this isn't an ai. This is riley from rentokil. But what he is carrying is using al to detect rat and mice infestations before they begin. The company have developed a new system called pest connect. Essentially ai—powered connected cameras, using google powered machine learning and object recognition to detect rodents. What we have here is a digital camera that takes digital photographs, but the beauty of this camera in relation to a standard camera is that the ai technology behind it, which allows us to go and check those stills and detect whether we have a rodent in that footage, in that image, it filters out anything that is not a rodent and alerts us and sends us that image of the rodent within the situation. So what does technology like this enable you to do that perhaps you would not have been able to do without this kind of device? traditionally a technician would turn up eight times a year to do a routine check and that would check every box on site or conventional monitoring devices. That can be quite labour—intensive, and can be intrusive for the customer, quite difficult for us to go and shut areas down. And then when they go away, there is no more monitoring. You have to rely on them coming back in around six weeks�* time. Essentially this camera is running 24/7 and with the ai technology behind it, it gives us that early alert which is what we need to be able to get on top of activity very quickly. Although there is still a need for pest control after these cameras, they claim that technology like this can prevent breeding colonies before they are established, reducing the need for rodenticide by up to a0%. It is already being used in large—scale environments where pest control is crucial, such as supermarket warehouses. What we do is we partnered with some of the best in the business when it comes to machine learning technology and what it does is it takes a photo using the fir sensor that is triggered by motion and heat and when it goes up into the cloud it is processed through an image processing pipeline we have built and that pipeline is designed to look for rodents in the photographs, we have trained it to look for all the different features of a rodent and if it does positively identify a rodent in the photo, that image is sent down from the cloud to colleague apps we have built, we have built an app for our technicians where they can look at the photos from a camera, see the pest activity and then off the back of that determine what they would like to do, how they would like to manage the infestation, they can track where a pest has come from and gone through different stages of the image, right through to how big is the infestation. Naturally i wanted to see how it works for myself. This is what our technician would expect to see inside the app we have built. These are the photos that have come through and if you positively identify the rodent in the photo, even if the rodent is moving or is quite far away or in the dark we can still detect the activity. What is interesting here is we don't need machine learning to tell us the one in the number two box is a mouse we can see that as a mouse, but i guess it is more for perhaps the number one, that is a little bit more obscure, it is a little harder to see, is that where this tech comes into play? exactly, and with cameras they can take hundreds of photos, so we could be accidentally triggered by light or a change in the environment due to heat for example, what we don't want to do is ask our technicians to go through hundreds and hundreds of photos so using the machine learning to positively identify what is in the photo and filter out the rest of the noise and in the app they can filter across to positive detections and look at only the images with rodents in them. The next stage for this technology is to identify individual species of rodent, and to incorporate other types of machine learning date sets to identify different pests, such as insects. 0k, whose stupid idea was it to film parts of this report with my feet in the waters of lake zurich? twice? i've just been told where the water in this lake comes from. If you leave them in there long enough, they become numb and you don't feel it anymore. Now, the person making a whole lot less fuss than me here isjulia, one of the team representing the star of the show, this underwater drone. We started off in the search—and—rescue space. So we're search and rescue and then also ammunition detection and retrieval. So we mainly started for the swiss police departments and the swiss military. Hence we created something that would work well in swiss waters, in particular rivers. So that's why our robot is built in a way that it can with stand strong currents. Just as aerial drones can hold their position in strong winds, this one can stay very still, even when the water around it is rushing past at three knots. Today, i guest get to see the latest upgrade to its low—drag shell and ai—powered control software, that adjusts to counter turbulence. It's the newest version of this drone. It's pretty nippy, can travel at about four knots, and it has on board cameras, but because the water is often far too murky to see what you're doing, it also has sonar, which it uses to build up a 3—d point cloud of the area. Some of the applications this is being pitched at include mapping and today, underwater toe inspection. How are they looking? blue? actually, are they still there? i can't feel them. Oh, god! time to take it for a dive. And for me to avoid hypothermia. Take me on an adventure. Show me the sites. As is common in robotics these days, andre is using a standard, familiar and importantly tried, tested and reliable games controller to steer the drone. It is a small fishing boat, nothing crazy. It goes pretty fast. It is not that slow. I can;t keep up and i was swimming seven years of my life, not professionally. I cannot keep up with this. It can dive to 300 metres and it sends live pictures and receives steering commands through a 1. 5 kilometre long cable and can operate without the cable, driving autonomously and avoiding obstacles and mapping its own area, which is no mean feat. No mean feat, given that it cannot see gps satellites from underwater. 0ur drone is able to map and localise at the same time. When it sees a new field it has never seen before, it can generate a map and when the robot returns to that position it can recognise it has been there and brings all the information together. A bit like a vacuum cleaner. Exactly. More or less the same thing butjust underwater. 0k. This ability to map an area, to see in poor visibility by using sonar as well as normal cameras plus the option to fit grippers and tools will allow industries operating in tricky environments to be targeted. I t may inspect oil and gas pipelines, communication cables, maybe even the hulls of ships. These are all areas that are hazardous even to the most highly skilled human divers. I love the fish. It is another example of what happens when students meet and study at university, in this case eth in zurich, and then decide to work together to take their research further. Who knows what discoveries await this little robot? there's a chair! laughter. I often see the occasional wild shopping trolley in a lake, but i rarely see a chair. Now, where did i leave my shoes? that is it from us from zurich, which is looking beautiful today. Thanks for watching, and we will see you soon. Hello there. Thursday brought us a mixture of sunshine and showers once again, but things are going to be changing in the next few days. Right now, it's still cold, we have that north—westerly breeze, but things are going to get milder over the weekend, although there will be some cloud around, and for some of us, some rain as well. But at the moment, we've got those north—to—north—westerly winds. Those are going to be replaced and the colder air cut off by winds coming in from the atlantic, and that will lift the temperatures, especially over the weekend, and probably beyond as well, as we'll see later. But a really cold start to friday, with a touch of frost in places. A sunny start, some cloud will develop, but we're not really expecting the showers this time. Northern ireland clouds over later, but the rain is holding off until right at the end of the day. Ahead of that, temperatures 14 degrees for much of scotland and northern ireland, again. A little bit warmer, though, or less cold, for england and wales, 16 or 17 degrees here. And the following night won't be as cold. We've got higher pressure in the south, these weather fronts are coming in around this area of low pressure, and picking the winds up across northern areas as we head into saturday. A little bit of rain first thing, but it's later in the day that we'll see the main band of rain coming across northern ireland and into western scotland. England and wales likely to be dry, some cloud, the best of the sunshine across eastern parts of england, and it's warming up a bit here as well, temperatures of 19, maybe 20 degrees, but right the way across the uk temperatures are going to be higher than what we've got at the moment. And during the second half of the weekend, that weather front slips its way further south, running into that area of high pressure. It's going to be weakening somewhat. Still be some cloud and some patchy rain on it. In the morning it's going to be affecting northern england, and that will clear away. Should see some rain, patchy rain for wales, maybe the midlands into the far south—west of england, and further north, more sunshine arriving and it's not going to be quite as windy either. We've still got temperatures of about 17, maybe 18 degrees in the north, and temperatures could reach 20 in the south east of england, where it should stay dry on sunday. That weather front continues to weaken on sunday night. We await another weather system to come in from the atlantic on monday, but for the most part, high pressure is going to be in charge on monday, and that means there will be some sunshine around, maybe a bit more cloud, though, coming in from the atlantic this time on monday. Most of the rain is restricted towards the far northwest of the uk, so, many places away from here are probably going to be dry. Some sunshine again for the east, and we've still got those temperatures reaching 20, maybe even 21 degrees in the south east of england, so that's a good deal better than what we've got at the moment. High pressure still around as we head further into next week. These weather systems are getting steered more towards the north and out of the way. A bit breezy across northern parts of scotland, but it should be a drier day, i think, on tuesday, and the rest of the uk will see some cloud but also some spells of sunshine, and the winds will be quite light as well. Temperatures getting up to 19 degrees quite widely, reaching 21 in the south east of england. The jet stream is going to be a bit further north in the outlook, it's steering areas of low pressure to the north of the uk, up towards iceland. Instead, we're going to be dominated by that large area of high pressure. Now, that's going to bring a lot of dry weather into next week. The position of the high is going to be crucial. We could well find, with light winds, some mist and fog patches around in the morning, before an easterly wind picks up, later on in the week, but again, it's looking dry and there will be some sunshine — it's reasonably warm by day, it's not going to be as cold at night. Live from washington, this is bbc news. Vladimir putin has a new warning for nato countries that may allow ukraine to use their weapons to strike russian territory. The un claims success in its effort to vaccinate gaza's children but condemns an israeli strike that killed its staff. Back at home, we all have a lot of work to do but from here, earth sure looks like a perfect world. Plus, a billionaire becomes the first amateur astronaut to walk in space. Hello, i'm lucy hockings. Vladimir putin has issued a stark warning to the west after reports that the us and countries in europe may soon lift restrictions on ukraine's use of long—range missiles into russia. On thursday, prime minister keir starmer said that russia started the war in ukraine and also has the power to end the conflict straight away. Sir keir is here in washington for talks with president biden on friday. It's expected they'll discuss whether or not to grant ukraine permission to fire their missiles at targets inside russia. Speaking to russian state television, president putin discussed the potential consequences if the west does lift those restrictions. Translation: if this decision is made, it will mean nothingl more than the direct participation of nato countries — the united states and european countries — in the war in ukraine. It is their direct participation and this,