Regan Morris looks at the housing crisis in LA where around 60,000 rough sleepers bed down each night. In a city of sky high rents and scarce availability, are dormitories the answer for young professionals struggling to rent or buy a place of their own? We take a tour of the city's 'pod' accommodation which houses multiple men and women in one room for $50 a night. We also look at zoning - a controversial policy which designates specific areas on the sidewalk for rough sleepers and would cut down the space available to bed down. And will tough restrictions on Airbnb help ease the pressure on housing?

Picture description: A man closes his tent after a night on the streets of Los Angeles, California Picture by Frederic.J.Brown for AFP via Getty Images

As a new decade dawns, Elizabeth Hotson asks if workplace design needs to be rethought to make work a more positive experience. We visit London-based customer finding company, MVF, which allows employees to bring their dogs into the office. The canine theme is continued at Sanity Marketing, where a Chihuahua called Lola calls the shots in the morning meeting. We try out the giant slide in the office of cloud computing company, Rackspace and visit The Wing which provides a work space for a mostly female membership base. We crowd into the sauna at global money transfer company Transferwise and Joshua Zerkel from technology firm, Asana in California extols the virtues of one meeting-free day a week. Meanwhile, Tom Carroll from property consultancy JLL, tells us what employees really want from workplaces. Producer: Elizabeth Hotson

Photo Description: Some offices have a dog-friendly office policy Photo by Elizabeth Hotson

In July 2019 Bangladesh took the unusual step of granting all its rivers “legal personhood”. It was the result of a long fight by environmental campaigners, alarmed by the damage done to the country’s vital river system by pollution and the effects of climate change. But does passing a law recognising that nature has rights, just as humans do, automatically guarantee its protection? According to its supporters, the movement for the Rights of Nature is an expanding area of law, but are those laws anything more than just symbolic? We talk to Dr Mohammad Abdul Matin by the banks of the Buriganga River in Dhaka about the future for the country’s rivers and in New Zealand to Chris Finlayson, who was attorney general in the centre right government that in 2017 passed a law recognising the Whanganui River as a living entity. And Cardiff University law professor, Anna Grear, tells us why giving natural phenomena the same legal status as humans is no safeguard against exploitation. Join Tamasin Ford on the foreshore of the River Thames to find out more about the rights of nature.

(Photo: Fisherman throwing his net into the Buriganga River, Credit: BBC)

Phosphate mining is crucial to global food production, given that phosphorus is an essential ingredient in commercial fertilisers. By far, the largest reserves of the world’s phosphates are in Morocco. And while Morocco is the third-largest miner of phosphates, a small percentage of its production comes from the disputed territory of Western Sahara. Morocco considers the territory as part of its country, something the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic and the Polisario Front vehemently disagree with.

Matt Davies travels to Morocco to speak to Nada Elmajdoub, an executive at the national phosphate company OCP. He also hears from Mohamed Kamal Fadel, a spokesperson for the Polisario Front, which is bringing legal challenges against Morocco's phosphate exports in its bid to win independence for Western Sahara.

Meanwhile Professor Stuart White of the University of Technology Sydney questions the sustainability of the planet's usage of mined phosphates to boost crop yields, plus Stephen Zunes, a professor of Middle East politics at the University of San Francisco, explains the history of the Western Sahara conflict and how Morocco gained the upper hand.

(Picture: Phosphate rock; Credit: prim91/Getty Images)

Can corporations be repurposed to prioritise society and the environment over profit? Ed Butler discusses the question with BBC Business Editor Simon Jack, who says he sees signs of real change.

With a climate emergency upon us, many people in business and finance appear to be having a genuine change of heart about economist Milton Friedman's famous maxim that the corporation's sole purpose should be to maximise shareholder value. Perhaps corporations have other responsibilities too?

Among the capitalists talking this new talk are Stephen Badger, chairman of the giant family-owned US confectionary company Mars, and Alan Jope, chief executive of Anglo-Dutch consumer goods conglomerate Unilever.

(Picture: A cute piggy bank sits astride a large pile of coins; Credit: Petmal/Getty Images)

When will artificial intelligence be capable of providing intelligent conversation? Jane Wakefield looks at two AI systems that still fall well short in the so-called Turing Test of passing themselves off as human.

Amazon's virtual assistant Alexa may be capable of ordering your groceries or even cracking a joke, but shockingly she has never heard of Business Daily. Despite this clear evidence of limited intelligence, head scientist Rohit Prasad insists that his baby has smarts.

Meanwhile a more glamorous build-you-own-buddy is Sophia (pictured), the android capable of 60 facial expressions, which apparently was enough to earn her Saudi citizenship. But is she more than just a pretty latex face? Jane speaks to her creator and biggest fan, David Hanson.

(Picture: The humanoid robot Sophia, which was granted citizenship in Saudi Arabia; Credit: Pavlo Conchar/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Facebook and Elon Musk are among those interested in the potential use of brain probes to read minds and enhance human capabilities.

Jane Wakefield looks at the technology of inserting electronic implants into the brain, and the ethical implications. Dr Ali Rezai of the Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute uses the probes to treat people with conditions such as epilepsy and drug addiction, but fears where commercialisation of the technology could lead.

Jane also speaks to bioethicist Dr Sarah Chan of the UK’s Royal Society; and with Noel Sharkey, professor of artificial intelligence at the University of Sheffield.

(Picture: MRI scan of a patient treated with a deep brain stimulation implant at Grenoble University Hospital in France; Credit: BSIP/UIG Via Getty Images)

Will giant drones one day ferry us all through the heavens all on our way to and from work? Jane Wakefield speaks to two German companies who are working on that vision.

Daniel Wiegand, co-founder of Lilium, says his company's sleek battery-powered creation can neither be seen nor heard as it whizzes through the air - which apparently is a good thing. Meanwhile Alexander Zosel, founder of rival Volocopter, assures Jane that commuters will be perfectly safe as they are raised aloft in his pilotless aircraft.

But aerospace analyst Richard Aboulafia questions whether these services will ever be affordable to the average bus or train passenger. Plus Jeremy Wagstaff.

(Picture: Visitors watch a prototype of the first flying taxi, the eVTOL by the company Lilium, at the Digital Summit in Nuremberg, Germany; Credit: Christof Stache/AFP via Getty Images)

City streets are becoming a valuable source of big data, so should we care who is gathering it and how it is being used?

In Shenzhen in China, the authorities are using video footage and facial recognition technology to reward or punish citizens' good or bad behaviour - such as littering or running red lights - via "social credit" systems.

Meanwhile in the Canadian city of Toronto, a new waterfront redevelopment is introducing similar sensors and smart tech from Google subsidiary Sidewalk Labs. But does this just represent another data bonanza for the tech giant at the expense of people's privacy?

Jane Wakefield speaks to Sidewalk Labs' head of urban systems Rit Aggarwala, local activist Julie Beddoes, as well as tech consultant Charles Reed Anderson,

(Picture: CCTV security camera front of a city office building; Credit: nunawwoofy/Getty Images)

Smart sensors can improve citizens' lives, especially when residents are put in charge of gathering the data.

Jane Wakefield reports from the Placa del Sol in Barcelona, where Guillem Camprodon of the city's Fab Lab explains how his initiative of placing noise detectors around the square helped residents finally get the city council to take the problem of night-time disturbances seriously.

Michael Donaldson, the city's commissioner for digital innovation argues that public authorities ought to be able to collect more user data, in the same way that online businesses do, in order to improve public services. But tech consultant Charles Reed Anderson warns that the hype around the potential for smart cities far exceeds what is currently achievable, while Sandra Baer of Personal Cities argues that humans need to remain at the centre of such efforts.

(Picture: Noise level sensor in Barcelona; Credit: BBC)

A group of artists look at how our modern hyper-connected always-on lifestyles are affecting our behaviour and interfering with our sleep.

Their work has been brought together in an exhibition at London's Somerset House, called 24/7: A Wake-Up Call for our Non-Stop World. Manuela Saragosa takes a tour with director and co-curator Jonathan Reekie.

Plus the Canadian artist and author Douglas Coupland tells Manuela how he religiously guards his sleep hours in the name of creativity, and how he remembers the moment he realised his brain was being rewired by the internet back in the 1990s.

Producer: Laurence Knight

(Picture: Sprites I by Alan Warburton, showing at Somerset House; Credit: Alan Warburton via Somerset House)

What happens to your online presence when you die, and who owns your data? Manuela Saragosa speaks to Carl Ohman, a researcher in the digital afterlife from the Oxford Internet Institute, and Dr Elaine Kasket, a counselling psychologist and author of All The Ghosts In The Machine: Illusions of Immortality in the Digital Age.

(Picture: Cloud in the form of a mouse cursor arrow; Credit: cinek20/Getty Images)