rules on wednesday. there will now on bbc news, click. this week: can taking your temperature stop the spread of coronavirus? so so you going or will genetics be the answer? or maybe you're just trying to drown out the noise. shall i, shan't i, shall i, shan't i? maybe not just now. gotta happen soon, though, hasn't it? welcome, hope you're well. laura is online too. how are you, mate? i'm good, thanks! i tried to edit out my roots before posting a picture on social media yesterday. laughter. didn't work — had to give up! your hair is going to get crazy soon, isn't it? listen, i've got something to cover up that hair if you're interested. take a look at this. oh goodness, that looks a bit dramatic! yeah, it is a thermal imaging helmet. now the idea is it can quickly screen people to check for fever. it's already being used in china, but the company now says they are talking to governments and police forces across the uk, europe, and the middle east. it looks quite menacing — but impressive if it does the job. yeah, and around the world, companies and governments are looking at testing people's temperatures to try and spot those who might have covid—i9. vodafone is another company that is rolling out thermal imaging with a camera which can scan up to eight people at a time. they say it is accurate to within 0.3 celsius. but the question is though — how useful is reading people's temperatures in stopping the spread of the coronavirus? people have variable core body temperatures. so the range is between 36.5—375 celsius. but there is some variability here, so that data itself might not be that useful. second, there is an increasing amount of evidence showing that a larger number of people are asymptomatic. so even if you do not develop a fever, then you can still go on to infect others. for the most part these days especially i would imagine most people who are feeling ill would put their hand up first and say "i'm not feeling well", or there is something wrong, and they wouldn't try to fool the device for example by taking ibuprofen and or paracetamol which would bring the temperature down anyway if it was only slightly elevated. so the practical utility of this idea seems to me rather limited. but vodafone feels it is still worthwhile. it is very possible to have false positives and to miss people coming through. however, we think we will catch or identify enough people that it is still a valuable tool to add to our toolkit for creating a safe working environment while we wait for a vaccine for covid—19. so instead ofjust taking a one—off temperature measurement, you could look at taking continuous ones — and even add data from other vital signs too. in fact, that's just what this trial is doing. liechtenstein, a principality with a population of only 38,000, is piloting a programme to fit its citizens with biometric bracelets in a drive to track potential cases of covid—i9 in real time. we tried to find, like, kind of a signature of this disease by measuring parameters of the human body that could give us an early indication if there is a second wave coming. the bracelet measures the heartbeat, the skin temperature, and some other parameters that can be easily measured on the wrist. but these bracelets are not a new product, and actually have a surprising origin. it's really a solution for couples who are trying to get pregnant. so through the device, you are measuring different physiological parameters, and based on those physiological parameters, we can detect the fertile window. then when covid started to arrive, we realised that the combination of the parameters that you are measuring could be — basically uniquely suited to look at covid and basically monitoring the infection. and we have a couple of other countries and larger projects that are also interested, so we might make this study part of a larger study in the end, and it would roll out europe—wide. however, the roll—out of biometric bracelets across europe may not be straightforward. health data is particularly sensitive data. so it has a higher level of protection. you can only process it on a member state basis if you have a strong legal basis provided by law to do that. so it might even be possible that some eu laws would need to adopt a new law allowing for the processing of the data. and in belgium, there is a very different type of wristband being introduced at the port of antwerp. when corona started, we had this idea where we said, "hey, wait a minute. we already do measuring between typically a device and between a machine. couldn't we just measure distance between two devices?" now we can also provide social distancing capabilities using the same technology, where the wearer gets a vibration when he or she comes too close — they need to step back to get out of the "dangerous zone". the bracelet could also be activated for contact tracing — but privacy is an objection. prior to covid—19, everybody thought, "my privacy is the starting point of everything" in every debate. well, that's not really the case any more if you have to make sure that everybody stays healthy, right? however, the introduction of this technology has worried trade unions. you have to understand how unions work and think. and if they do not fully understand what this is as a piece of technology and what it provides, and where the benefits are fortheir members, they object by definition, right? and i think that is a mistake some of the companies make, saying, "oh, this is cool technology, we're going to implement this," without taking the time to explain what this is for and what the benefits are. across the world, companies are recognising that their products can be repurposed in the battle against covid—i9. however, as governments increasingly look to technology as a solution, ethical and legal boundaries are starting to be tested. hello and welcome to the week in tech. it was the week that robots were being developed to test temperatures in waiting rooms in sweden. a new quadruped robot dog was unveiled by a chinese company unitree, and full—body disinfection pods were trialled at hong kong airport. this booth has an antimicrobial coating and sprays passengers for a0 seconds with a sanitising mist. it was also the week that an engineer and senior vice—president at amazon made a million—dollar decision to quit hisjob over allegations of unsafe factory conditions. tim bray said workers had been fired for circulating a petition about working conditions. amazon says the employees were dismissed for violating internal practices. drone air corridors will be created for remote regions of the uk, according to the civil aviation authority, allowing for contactless deliveries of essential items. the relaxed flying rules will see designated zones where drone operators can fly out of the line of sight if they meet safety standards. nasa announced it's teaming up with tom cruise to make a film about the international space station, but wouldn't comment on speculation the actor may be headed into orbit. nasa says more details on the film will be revealed at the appropriate time. and finally, robots seem to be lending a helping hand all over the place these days, and grocery shopping is no exception. this robot called secondhands is funded by the eu. it has been designed by a consortium of universities and online grocery retailer ocado. his purpose is providing a second pair of hands for workers and taking over more menial tasks. at times during this lockdown, it has felt like life might never be the same again. the stress of financial uncertainty coupled with the intensity of being cooped up at home could be a dangerous combination environmental health. patient. info has a wealth of articles on clinical advice curated by medical authors. younger viewers and their parents and carers can turn to young minds which include support for people with other conditions such as ocd and autism that they are now coping with the lockdown. covid calm was set up to help healthcare workers with free mindfulness and mental healthcare tools. ppe for the mind, if you will. if your mental health and don't need that kind of support, congratulations — a little mindful meditation may help you stay that way. daily meditation exercises from the smiling mind app help me tune out counter—productive worrying and focus on things i can control. and spotify is creating a daily wellness playlist full of podcasts, meditation guides and more. of course in the age of ai, there are plenty of bots to chat it out with if you can't find a human. wysa chats through your problems, suggesting thera py—based exercises to help. i've found it can't talk specifically about coronavirus yet, but you can bring in a qualified human therapist if you upgrade to premium. booster buddy helps you start the day with free mindfulness tasks and can be set up to manage your to—do list and medication reminders as well. and my possible self has a mood tracker and suggests health and well—being exercises appropriate to your state of mind. and one click viewer is curating a covid—i9 newsfeed for his family filled with only positive stories. sometimes just taking a break from your own worried head is enough to keep you going. and homenauts is the perfect place to look for inspiration. as well as tips from the professionally isolated on surviving a lockdown, there is a crowdsourced list of activities you can try to take your mind off things. there is no order to this rapidly growing compendium, but scrolling through it feels like a kind of therapy in itself. and i'm going to leave you with a page that now resides permanently on my second monitor, for those moments when i need less covid—i9 and more puppy. that was kate. if you have concerns or could just do with some reassurance or coping tactics at the moment, you can visit the nhs website where they have a coronavirus portal with links to approved helplines. ok, let's talk about the latest research into the virus. and for that, we have to go to iceland. back in 2013 we went to iceland to a company called decode genetics, who were doing genetic research on what is a pretty unusual country. see, iceland has a record of its people's ancestry going back 1000 years. and therefore it has some idea of who shares genes with who. icelanders have also been donating blood to the company for years, which is then deep frozen in this blood bank, so it can be used for future research into what genes may make people resistant or susceptible to certain diseases. and now that is paying off in spades. i spoke to the director of decode earlier, and he told me that having sequenced the genes of half the population, he has had a massive head start in trying to work out why the coronavirus affects some people worse than others. this team has been working together for almost a quarter of a century and it feels like everything else we have done, it feels like merely a preparation for this. we have an enormous amount of data on the people who got infected. we are in a privileged position to look at the genetics of the patients and see how the genetics influences the probability of getting infected and the probability of getting seriously ill when you become infected. decode has now tested nearly 14% of the population for the coronavirus, the highest in any country. that has really informed our understanding of covid—i9. for example he says that contrary to some reports, it seems that nearly everyone who has the disease does eventually display symptoms. and the race is now on to understand why those symptoms range so widely from the very mild to the very severe. is it because they have previously caught a different coronavirus and developed some immunity? or is it to do with different strains of the viruses itself? viruses naturally mutate as they travel from one person to another, and as this one has spread, it has morphed into many different strains that can be identified from its genetic data, and which are being shared by scientists across the world. what is not known at the moment is whether some strains are more harmful than others. when viruses mutate, they usually mutate to become more infectious and less harmful. because the evolutionary goal of the virus is to go as widely as possible, to become as many as possible. and if the virus causes a serious disease, then it limits the transmission because the person who becomes seriously ill is not going to move around and spread the virus. but this virus has found a way around this because most people are mildly infected they can roam around and spread the virus all over the place, but then there are the few unfortunate, so this virus has the best of both worlds — it can spread widely and it can kill. what's also fascinating is that because the virus has mutated as it is travelled across the world, it's possible for geneticists to examine a patient and tell them the route that their infection took as it travelled from china. in the us, for example, the virus first arrived on the west coast directly from china. but meanwhile, another strain was making its way across europe and it arrived in new york in the middle of march and that was the strain that eventually came to dominate the country, probably because new york is the gateway most americans use to come back home. and while italy seemed to be the epicentre of the european rate, something else was going unnoticed. when the authorities were focusing on people coming from ski vacations in the alps, the virus was clearly sneaking into the country from other countries such as great britain and it's absolutely clear that very early in the epidemic, the virus was widely spread in greater society because a very significant proportion of the cases in iceland came to iceland from those who were travelling from great britain. despite everything, iceland is now starting to recover from the epidemic. it's come through with very few deaths and without the complete lockdown that many countries have enforced. this, says dr stefa nsson, is because with widespread testing, the country could quickly find those who are infected, trace who they'd been in contact with and then just isolate those people, stopping the epidemic before it got out of control. some, of course, would say that iceland has had it relatively easy with its small population and remote location. would these kind of measures, including this massively manually intensive contact tracing, work in bigger countries like the uk? listen to me, there is no alibi in your size. you could use exactly the same methods we have used and i think you could be as effective as just we, as long as there is a number of resources to do it. yes, in great britain, you have a lot more people who are infected because your population size is incredibly much larger than ours, but you have also more people to do the work. i think that what is amazing when you look at this epidemic, the two mostresourceful countries in the world really, the united kingdom and the united states, that they were completely unprepared for this. this has been a demonstration of how preparation and early action has saved lives. but it's also a demonstration of how far technology has come to be able to crunch the enormous amount of data that is now spotting needles in genetic haystacks. i think that what this epidemic is showing is how incredibly powerful it is to be able to bring together large amounts of information, bring it together and mine it effectively. we would not have been able to do this 20 years ago. really interesting stuff. yeah, i know, let's hope they and other scientists keep making those breakthroughs. let's hope so. now, a lot of us are, of course, working from home at the moment. and as well as trying to perfect your background for video calls, a lot of us are having to put up with things like this... dog barks or this... alarm rings yeah, i'm often trying to compete with the washing machine's fast spin cycle, i have to say! well, chris fox has been trying to find ways to be heard above the background noise. today, i'm on a mission to make as much noise as possible to see whether machine—learning can clean up ouraudio. you might have seen online, a lot of gamers are really excited that nvidia, the graphics card maker, is testing some noise cancelling technology. it's called rtx voice, and to try it out, i have a professional microphone here and a high—end gaming laptop with an nvidia rtx graphics card. and on this side, i have an ordinary laptop running some software called crisp, which says it can do the same thing without the expensive graphics card. the first test is a noisy city apartment. i've left the doors open so we can hear the trains going past. the washing machine is on and, for good measure, this speaker is blasting out the sound of a dog barking. ok, i can heara train going past now. so let's turn on the noise cancellation... and what nvidia says it's doing here is using al on the graphics card on a bit of spare capacity that you might not be using while gaming to do the noise cancellation. ok, we have a train going past. so, same experiment again — let's turn on the noise cancellation — there's the dog. and how does the laptop fare without the graphics card? this is just a software ai running on an ordinary laptop. next, we will test in a coffee shop. and since i can't go to a real one, i'm playing crowd noise from this speaker, we are using the coffee machine and playing some music from the speaker — all while i read the blurb on claire from steps' autobiography. "claire richards has been an extraordinary roller coaster journey since shejoined steps at 19. after the highs of chart—topping success and the fame that brought, her life hit rock bottom when she left the band. but she fought her way back to create a whole new career in television, finding her inner strength along the way. now she's finally ready to bare it all." round three is total chaos. i'm using a hair dryer and a vacuum cleaner, and there's an alarm going off — all while i read the introduction to the bbc‘s royal charter. "royal charter — for the continuance of the british broadcasting corporation. elizabeth ii, by the grace of god of the united kingdom of great britain and northern ireland..." "royal charter — the continuance of the british broadcasting corporation. elizabeth ii, by the grace of god of the united kingdom of great britain and northern ireland..." well, let's talk to davit baghdasaryan from crisp. my first question is, are you using your noise—cancelling tech? because we will be listening for every bit of background noise. yeah, absolutely, it is always turned on on my laptop. but let me clap and demonstrate. you won't hear anything. now, we have thrown a lot at the software today, and it did a really good job — although with some of the louder noises, it did make the voice sound a bit processed. is that something you're working on? we have a number of technologies we are working on right now. and at some point, it's going to start adapting to your voice. and it'll be, like, way more amazing than this demo, actually. now both crisp and rtx voice work really well on a laptop with pretty much any video calling app you could want. but you are much more limited on android and ios smartphones. so are you hoping to partner with individual apps? we are doing those very strategically. we are very careful who we are partnering with. we did partner with discord, for example, and now crisp is powering 200 million users when they do, like, voice communication. so we think that was a great partnership and we are very proud of that. i've really thrown a lot at both of these systems today, using deliberate background noise. but both of them have done a pretty good job of cleaning it up, even under extreme circumstances. now nvidia is keen to point out that its system is just a test at the moment. but for gamers who already have those high—end rtx graphics cards, it is a nice extra feature to have and should stop annoying background noise getting into your voice chat when gaming online. and for everybody else, software like crisp can help clean up our voice calls and video calls if you can't convince your housemates to be quiet. chris fox, coming through loud and clear! and that's it for this week. thanks for being there again, lara. thank you for being there again. my pleasure. throughout the week, you can keep track of the team, albeit from hom, on youtube, instagram, facebook and twitter at @bbcclick. tell you what, if i'm brave enough, i might even put the trim online. don't hold me to it, though. i tell you what, why not send out send us your photos of your lockdown haircut disasters? make me feel better. thanks for watching, and we'll see you soon. bye— bye. very chilly out there at the moment. the cold weather which arrived on sunday is here to stay for the next few days. it's certainly not going to be warming up in a hurry. here's the cold front on the satellite picture, which swept across the uk. and behind it, cold airsurging in from the northern climes, all the way from the arctic, and spreading into other parts of europe through early monday as well. and, as i say, that is going to stick around for a few days. now, overall, monday is going to be a bright if not sunny day. but at times it will cloud over, and we are expecting some showers, particularly across scotland, and maybe one or two on the north sea coast. and actually, through early monday, a few showers peppered around across yorkshire and the very far north of the uk, but predominantly it's clear. that's led to a frost across scotland, northern england, an air frost, and certainly a ground frost in southern parts of the uk, at least in a few areas. so monday gets off to a chilly but sunny start. the winds will be very brisk. you can see them blowing off the north sea there, on the yorkshire coast, east anglia and into the south—east. temperatures struggling — we should be closer to 17 in the south. we may not even make 12 degrees, and single figures on the north sea coast. now, here's tuesday's weather map. high pressure's with us. that does mean mostly dry weather, though not completely, because on the edge of this high pressure, there is this little mini cold front which is going to sweep in even colder weather temporarily into scotland. notice the blobs of blue there in scotland, and even some white there, indicating some wintry showers. so scotland on tuesday a very chilly day, with perhaps some sleet and snow moving across the highlands. only five degrees in stornoway. to the south of that, it won't be quite so cold. temperatures should make double figures, around 10—11. and mildest conditions there in the south—west of the uk, perhaps even 13 or 14 degrees. and then, on wednesday, again a couple of showers potentially affecting the north sea coast, but otherwise it's just broken cloud, some good sunny spells coming through, and temperatures still struggling, typically around say 10—12 degrees. just that slightly milder spot there in the south—west of the uk, perhaps 14 or 15. and the temperatures will gradually recover through the course of the week, perhaps making 16 or 17 by the time we get to friday, and maybe even 20 over the weekend. bye— bye. welcome to bbc news — i'm aaron safir. our top stories: the british government announces a plan to end its lockdown — but there's disagreement from scotland, wales and northern ireland. we are taking the first careful steps to modify our measures. if there are problems, we will not hesitate to put on the brakes. the opposition says the plan doesn't answer crucial questions — and trade unions call it a recipe for confusion. south korea is facing a second spike in infections — just a few days after beginning to ease its lockdown. and we'll report from thailand, where infections remain low — but restrictions are likely to remain in place for some time.

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