at 2am. now on bbc news, it's time for click. this week, the best view in the world, super—smart singapore, and a race to save shanghai. 5:1i5am on sunday 19th october 2014, 19 miles above new mexico, and the type of sunrise that not many people have ever seen. it's the view from a test flight which is preparing to take tourists into the stratosphere by balloon. while all the attention has been focused on space tourism using rockets and space planes, we've got exclusive access to one company in the arizona desert that's been quietly building its own spaceport. welcome to world view. it's really the way to do space tourism, because you want to go and spend time and look at the view and have a gentle ride up and a gentle ride back. i mean, look, the rocket rides are going to be great, i'm sure, but for me, i want to sit there with my glass of champagne and my best friend and look. tickets are currently selling for $75,000 each for a two—hour ascent in a pressurised capsule to an altitude of 100,000 feet. today, one of world view‘s co—founders and his team are showing me a small piece of the balloon‘s material, a secret blend of polyethylene and other materials. i can't help but notice you have, ithink, the world's biggest table. tell me you use this for christmas dinners. absolutely, you should see the parties we have on this table! so how long is the table? it's about a tenth of a mile. 0k! and, seriously, are you going to make a balloon that covers this entire table? so full—scale balloons for heavy—lift flights, so like a voyager flight, use the entire table. if you want to take a payload that is 10,000 pounds to 105,000 feet, it takes a balloon the size of this entire table, so you could take a football field and spin it inside the balloon when it's fully inflated. whoa! contrary to what i thought, as the helium expands, it doesn't cause the material to stretch. instead, the gas just occupies more of the initially empty balloon. can you navigate when you are up there? can you actually decide on a course? or are you subject to whichever way the wind blows? so it turns out that in the stratosphere you very often get counter—flowing winds, the stratosphere and the troposphere going different directions, and in that interface the wind swirls. so by guiding my altitude up and down, i can sort of sail the stratosphere, much like a ship uses the currents and winds to sail the oceans. i think that is really the innovation that were pushing, is figuring out how to do that navigation, when you can find the right winds and how you take advantage of different kinds of swirling in the winds. that is a large part of the innovation, along with just the ability to control your altitude and use solar energy to go up and go back down. and then there's the question of how you get back down again, which is apparently like this. they go into what's pretty close to freefall for something like ten seconds, so it feels very light, like going over the top of a roller—coaster, just feeling light, and then we come back to about 16, 12 or 15 seconds later, so we're just gaining some speed, and then it feels like a normal flight in an aircraft. but you have to be finished your champagne by then. one of our requirements was that you don't spill your champagne, literally, when that happens, and so i think we are going to have a little cup on the champagne. first world problem! "could you now put a little lid over the top of your champagne as we drop you back from space?" the person who will make sure you don't spill your booze, or any other fluid for that matter, is the pilot. it's a unique job, and that's why an ex—nasa test pilot and astronaut will be the one pulling the strings, as it were. what are your controls? when you are on a parafoil or something like that, you have this left—right thing going on, is that what you've got, two strings? you can think of it that way, but in reality the spacecraft is about 10,000 pounds. we've got a parachute that's the size of a basketball court, so we couldn't physically, you know, have enough force to pull on it. so we are actually controlling and probably with a joystick, we're still designing exactly what it's going to look like, but that joystick or that whatever controller is controlling motors that are pulling on lines on the parachute, just like you would if you were skydiving, butjust on a much, much bigger scale. what will this look like when it's kitted out for passengers? when it's kitted out for passengers, it will have these tremendous windows, at least four of them, four big ones and then some smaller ones. there will be seats for everybody, there will be a bar, who wants a spacecraft without a bar? and it will have a bathroom, it's a five—hour flight, at least, so you need a bathroom on board too. and you say this is the first spacecraft you've flown with a bar, so you've flown other spacecraft, then? i have. tell me about this. so i've flown on both the us space shuttle and i flew on the russian soyuz spacecraft. how do you think this will compare to that? it'll be a different experience, i can tell you that, you know, when we came back with the soyuz, for instance, we hurtle through the atmosphere on fire at five miles per second. it's a very violent, very dynamic, lots of g forces, you're getting thrown all over the place in the cockpit, you feel the heat, you're labouring to breathe. this will be nothing like that. this will be a lot more gentle, a lot more relaxing, and frankly it will enable people to take in the experience a lot more. it's not like you're wondering whether you're going to survive the next second or not. we are going to have more from world view in a few minutes, but first let's come back down to earth and talk about the cities of our future, cities which are already capable of guiding our decisions, thanks to an explosion in cameras, sensors and artificially intelligent technology. jen copestake has been to one of the most hi—tech places on earth to see what might be in our connected future. there's been a great variety of connected devices that have entered our lives in the last few years. we've seen many concepts at trade shows around the world, with irons, fridges and robots communicating through the internet of things. finding the best ways to put these devices to good use for wider society is a challenge that large companies and governments are now taking on. singapore is the perfect test—bed for internet of things technologies. it's a quintessential smart city, and that is because it's only a0 kilometres across, so it's very small, and the government here is heavily invested in technology initiatives, including investing in sensors all around the city. along with sensors to monitor pollution and traffic, some buildings in singapore are equipped with accelerometers to monitor elderly people's movements. yuhua is a smart region of the city where all the homes are kitted out with smart technology. the government has now created an impressive 3d map model of yuhua where every tiny detail can be seen. what they did was they actually flew planes over the entire singapore and scanned the entire country, and then what we did was take the model and load it in here, and we enhanced the model to this level of quality. that's cool. so these are separately modelled from the buildings, the buildings are separately modelled as each building, object, for example. if you click on a building, it tells you consumption versus generation, for example, all right? and you could click on solar panel, and you just get... for those particular panels. exactly. this is, again, very typical of singapore, high—rise living. and that is the waste management. it incredible, we are seeing these green pathways shooting out across the building, where are they going? they are not meteors or anything like that, they are just simulating how garbage is disposed in high—rise living, down the chute, you open the hopper, you drop the garbage, and it gets collected in a huge bin down at the bottom. it's certainly mesmerising, which is something i never thought i'd say about garbage collection. it's quite a science here! and for driving around the city, how about a ride in an autonomous taxi? singapore became the world's first city to introduce the cars created by mit start—up nutonomy that travel around six kilometres of the city's tech district. companies are also testing the way that artificial intelligence can integrate into projects. ibm has opened a new lab here, focusing on al. this includes a pilot we saw late last year, where its watson system is helping this is in a busy icu ward by monitoring vital signs and triaging the most at—risk patients. you could even think of this as a command and control centre for multiple hospitals, right? because parkway has a network of hospitals, and if they really wanted to, they could create a kind of command and control centre, where someone is monitoring all their icus around the region. if you see that some of your patients are trending negatively, you obviously want to focus more on them, and the ones that are doing fine, you canjust continue monitoring as per normal. but you know where to put your energy and put your resources. the singapore government is pushing digital transformation with its new agency, govtech. we had a brief demo of its online services, including myinfo, a portal designed to make things like banking transactions easier by keeping verification details all in one place. it's protected by strict data—protection laws and is an opt—in service. the overarching idea is to make technologies such a central part of life here, to make it possible to keep pace with regulation. we've seen this to be more challenging elsewhere, particularly with laws on autonomous vehicles. singapore will continue to act as a tech testing ground for finding ways to integrate new technologies with society and be a case study for other countries to watch. hello and welcome to the week in tech. it was the week that mark zuckerberg appeared in court to deny accusations that the software behind facebook owned oculus‘s success was stolen. meanwhile, instagram has followed in owner facebook‘s footsteps, adding a live video streaming function for uk users, although each one will self—destruct as soon as it finishes. a disappearing photo option has appeared too. mobile network ee has been fined £2.7 million for overcharging tens of thousands of customers. and squirrels have been blamed for being a bigger threat to the power grid than the risks posed by international cybercriminals. samsung, listen up — researchers at stanford university have developed a lithium—ion battery that claims to release a fire extinguishing material if overheating occurs. if you're wondering where the robots are in this week's news, well, they seem to have gone walkabout. this telepresence mind—controlled bot has been developed to help those with severe motor disabilities. claiming to be the first of its kind available to consumers, it connects through an off—the—shelf brain control device, resulting in users feeling as though they are in two places at once. and finally, if you ever travelled to japan, you'll know about the toilets, which are beautifully hi—tech, but you may not be quite sure what to make of them. well, some leading manufacturers have agreed on a standardised set of icons for common cleaning features to help tourists know what they're letting themselves in for. i'm in the arizona desert near tucson at the new headquarters of world view, which is planning to take people to the stratosphere in a helium balloon. this is spaceport tucson. this is a 700 foot wide circle just outside of world view‘s buildings, and in just a couple of weeks‘ time, this is where they will launch a space balloon from for the first time. it's a circle so that they can lay the balloon out in any direction they need to, depending on the wins on that day. i've just got to say, if you've never been to the desert, i don't think you really have an appreciation of how big the sky is. that is what it's all about. world view‘s boss, jane poynter, is a developer of technologies for extreme environments like space. and she hopes that the view from 20 miles up will give passengers a unique perspective on the fragility of our planet. and curiously, this project was born out of a view that was pretty much the opposite — when its two founders took part in a two—year study of how age humans, plus animals and plants, would interact and survive in a completely closed ecosystem. you come from a space background, but really interesting, in the early 90s, you shut yourself away in biosphere 2 with some other crazy... i mean, some other people! what was that like? oh, my gosh, so biosphere 2 was actually an inspiration for world view, so when we were in the biosphere, one of the most extraordinary experiences that i had, and i think most of the people in there had, was the experience of really being part of our biosphere, and you really get this sense of the unity of the biosphere that we are in, that is on such a huge scale, but in normal life we can't even imagine it, really. and it's a very similar idea to the experience that astronauts having the earth from space, and it was that experience that we wanted to give people, because of the experience that we've had in the biosphere. so i guess it's easy to imagine that we are all looking at you guys in the biosphere, but i suppose you're looking out from a unique vantage point as well. that is right, so both truths are true, so we had people walk around the outside of the biosphere, and i got e—mails from people who said, i get it now! i've been hearing about the fact that this planet is a finite place for some many years, and i never understood until i walked around this miniature version of our planet. and suddenly i got it, i could see its boundaries, i knew that you guys that were living inside only had what you had in there, which is exactly the same as we have right here on planet earth, on spaceship earth. emotions certainly run high in that kind of environment, but they're not all bad. one of the other biosphere 2 crewmembers was taber maccallum, who later becamejane‘s husband. he's explaining how, although a balloon can't technically get you into the vacuum of space, the conditions in the stratosphere are similar enough, with very low air pressure and extremes of temperature in the sun and shade, to mean that world view‘s balloons are already carrying scientific equipment up in so—called stratolites, which can hang over one location for days at a time. so there's satellites in low earth orbit that are whizzing around at 17,000 mph, there are satellites in geostationary orbit that are very far away, have a hard time focusing in on things. and then below that we have aircraft, that can carry cameras and drones, and where we sit is sort of between all those. we can sit over a piece, persist over a piece of land for a while, and we have a close view, because we are only about 20 miles up, but we don't have the speed and expense of being a rocket, and we don't have all of the fuel burn of flying an airplane through the air. it is a compelling argument, i suppose — that rockets are dangerous, and they are expensive, and they are rather noisy. and if you want to send something up close to space, and you can do it with a balloon, why wouldn't you? it's also a compelling argument that the more people who see the earth from way up there,the more people may have the kind of transcendental shifting viewpoint that seems to be striving the team here. it changes the way you embed yourself in our biosphere, the way you think about our place in this biosphere that we inhabit. i mean, it clearly changes the way many people have gone about developing our environmental movement. it changes the way we think about communication around the planet, collaborating with people around the planet. it really does strip away the notion of boundaries, of national boundaries, because we think of this as an entity that we all inhabit at once. what has changed is my definition of the word "home", and when we had the re—entry of the soyuz spacecraft, we initially hit the ground, flipped and rolled over, and now my window was pointing down at the ground, and i remember looking at the window and seeing a rock, a flower and a blade of grass, and i rememberthinking, "i'm home." what was really interesting about that thought is i was home, but i was in kazakhstan, and so to me my home wasn'tjust in houston, texas, where at the time i lived with my family — my home expanded to include earth, and i think our definition of that word home has profound implications for how we problems on our planet, how we treat each other, how we treat our planet, and i think that is one of the things that we're trying to do here. we're trying to bring that perspective to as many people as we can, because i think the more people who have that perspective, the more people who have the opportunity to see our planet from that vantage point, the better of all of us here on the surface are going to be. there are few countries which can match the speed at which the us is boldly striding into the future, but china is certainly one of them. with an economy that is doubling in size every decade, china is in a hurry. but unlike america, often that progress is built literally on top of some amazing history — railroading through plans for new—builds without pausing to preserve the past. dan simmons has been to shanghai to meet the city's professor of preservation. i found this problem, they destroyed these older buildings, so i warned them, you can't do it. but i think they don't understand the value of these buildings, so after that i just gave the information to the newspaper. the professor is unusual for china in that he's not afraid to speak out against plans to destroy some of the country's finest architectural heritage. oh, wow! what a mess! do you know why they've pulled down heritage buildings like this? i think the reason is they think these buildings are not safe and not comfortable for people who live here, so the government may be want to do some good thing, but in the wrong way. what used to be here looks like that building behind, didn't it? the same, yeah, quite old, i think most of them are about 100 years old, wooden structure, typical local buildings. i think it's quite important historical memory of this, so i feel very sorrow for what they do. the chinese authorities say these buildings, a0 minutes' drive from downtown shanghai, need upgrading. but the materials aren't traditional, and neither is the style. so for the professor, this is a race against time, first to capture everything that still here. the professor's team uses a 3d laser scanner. pictures are taken, the taller structures by drone. and then back at base, image—based modelling allows them to add photorealistic skins to the inch—perfect reconstruction. in many examples, from temples to colonial schools, the professor tries to stop the destruction, but where he can't, his team recreates these communities virtually. this is one of the visualisations of the rubble that we were standing on earlier. and here is the 3d model of what was there. using old photos, some given to the team by local residents, the picture slowly builds, including of the buildings already destroyed. materials, building styles and colour matching adds to the accuracy of what the professor hopes will be a lasting digital legacy to show future generations. reconstructing the model is all done by hand. it's incredibly quick. even at this speed, the project will take around six months to complete. shanghai is changing so fast. for a city of china, we must face this problem. removing so many older buildings, so many older districts. comparing to a european city, i think we must focus on this kind of problem, because our city is becoming newer and newer so fast. that was dan in shanghai, and that is it from world view in tucson, arizona. what a fascinating story this is turning out to be. you can follow us on twitter, as always, @bbcclick throughout the week, we'll put loads of backstage photos and gossip up there. thanks for watching, and we'll see you soon. hello. many of us have enjoyed quite a settled spell of weather over recent days, but that's not to say that we're all enjoying the same sorts of conditions. the weather watcher pictures again tell the tale. cold and frosty starts in the south of britain. converting to gloriously sunny days in many spots. and here is the variety that i was talking about. because in the flow of high—pressure we have had in the weather front, it has produced cloudy and murky conditions for many at times. initially across wales, the midlands, and at times, it has gone a little bit further north and east, such that it will be a real player in the east of the british isles on saturday. cloud in parts of devon and cornwall. keeping the frost at bay for some here. but then underneath those clear skies, i don't doubt somebody in the countryside on the borders between england and wales will be recording temperatures on the first part of saturday at —5, —6, something of that order. it will be a bright start across a good part of scotland. but as a consequence, a frosty one. as i was saying, the cloud from that old weather front still lurking with intent out in the north sea. and as the day progresses, it mayjust come into play a little bit further into central parts of england. may be getting into the scottish borders too. if you're underneath that, you may well find the odd spot of rain, and over higher ground maybe a fleck of snow. that will not be an issue for the fourth round of the scottish cup. some cloud further south into england for the premier league. and then it's something of a hit and miss with regard to the night—time frost that take you out of saturday into sunday. the north of scotland should see some frost. so should the southern counties of england. here we are into sunday. just watch out for the odd patch of fog around. as i said, it's something of a patchwork. we have an area of cloud producing showers outbursts of rain here. may be a patch of ice or two here. summer showers in the eastern shores. showers in the eastern shores. temperatures, again, not overly spectacular for this time of year. the start of next week, just keeping a very close on developments, because fog could become a real player in the heart of england down through central and southern parts as well. if you are on the move first thing, and indeed for much of the morning, some of those patches could be quite dense. just the first signs on tuesday of the wind freshening, and maybe a frontal system bringing cloud and rain to northern and western parts. welcome to bbc news, broadcasting to viewers in north america and around the globe. our top stories: president donald trump signs his first executive order in the oval office after taking the oath earlier in the day. to defend the constitution of the united states, so help me god. tens of thousands gather to watch as mr trump vows to give power to them — to the people. a new vision will glove on our land. from this