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Digital Planet: Virgin's Supersonic and Space Travel

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Richard Branson shows a model of Launcher One at the Farnborough International Airshow, July  2012.

17/10/2017 GMT

Virgin's Supersonic and Space Travel

BBC World Service - Digital Planet, Virgin's Supersonic and Space Travel

Richard Branson's Virgin Hyperloop One and Virgin Galactic

Virgin Hyperloop One and Virgin Galactic; Unrest, the ME documentary; Brighton Digital Festival - the Messy Edge; The Chinese Typewriter: A History

Virgin has recently invested in a futuristic technology, Virgin Hyperloop One, which aims to create a speedy pod-based transport system. Alison van Diggelen talks to Richard Branson about his ambitious plans, including supersonic and space travel. 

Unrest, a documentary exploring the mysterious condition of ME, was filmed across continents by the director Jennifer Brea who was mostly confined to her bed with ME/CFS.  Brea tells Click how she could call in via Skype from her bed, and then interviewees could see her reflection from the teleprompter in the lens of the camera.

A new conference for Brighton Digital Festival, The Messy Edge, is an exploration of the frontiers of digital culture, a challenge to dominant perspectives and a place to consider how we run the risk of building a future on the deeply flawed foundations of the present. Bill Thompson reports from the conference.

In The Chinese Typewriter: A History, Tom Mullaney recalls the great engineering and linguistic challenges in the 19th and 20th Centuries of getting the Chinese language onto a table top machine. One consequence was the development of predictive text in the Chinese IT world long before it appeared in the West. Click talks to Tom Mullaney.

Producer: Colin Grant

(Photo: Richard Branson shows a model of Launcher One at the Farnborough International Airshow July  2012.  Credit: Adrian Dennis/AFP)

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