Noughts and Crosses has returned for second season. This gripping adaptation of Marjorie Blackman’s book series continues as star-crossed lovers Callum (Jack Rowan) and Sephy (Masali Baduza) abscond from the discriminatory government of Albion. Our guide below details how to watch Noughts and Crosses season 2 online and 100% FREE for free via BBC iPlayer in the UK.
Noughts and Crosses imagines an alternative history: one in which, 700 years ago, a collective of West African nations created the Aprican Empire and colonized Europe. That resulted in a Black political orthodoxy whose elite, called “Crosses”, live a fraught co-existence with a white underclass, called the “Noughts”.
Season 2 sees the country of Albion in turmoil. A pregnant Sephy is on the run with Callum after the Nought’s terrorist attempts to derail the government – run by corrupt politician Kemal (Peterson Joseph) – while Jude (Josh Dylan) goes into hiding when the actions of the Liberation Militia result in vigilante violence.
Alongside the main cast, Cara (Top Boy’s Jasmine Jobson) makes an unlikely ally for Jude, while rapper Michael Dappah features as an influential TV personality with his onscreen foil Chidi Abara played by Judi Love.
Blackman promises fans lots of surprises and suspense. So read on as we explain how to watch Noughts and Crosses season 2 online now and stream every episode from anywhere.
How to watch Noughts and Crosses season 2 online for FREE in the UK
How to watch Noughts and Crosses season 2 online from outside your country
Don't let geo-restrictions prevent you from watching brand-new episodes of Noughts and Crosses. If you’re travelling abroad when the show airs, you’ll struggle to access your normal streaming service. However, we can get you out of this sticky situation with the help of a VPN.
The best VPN – otherwise known as a virtual private network – offers a simple solution. This piece of software alters your IP address to appear as though you're based in another country, allowing you to gain access to your preferred streaming platform, and watch episodes live or on-demand just like you would at home.
Use a VPN to watch Noughts and Crosses online from anywhere
Three simple steps to using a VPN to watch Noughts and Crosses
1. Download and install a VPN - we recommend ExpressVPN
2. Connect to the relevant server location - launch the VPN app, click on 'choose location' and select the right location i UK for iPlayer
3. Head to the chosen broadcaster's live stream - in this case, head to BBC iPlayer
Could 'information batteries' prevent renewables from wasting so much energy?
If you know anything about renewable energy, you probably have heard about its intermittency problem: the sun doesn't always shine and the wind doesn't always blow, so energy production from renewables doesn't provide the kind of consistent power generation of fossil fuels or nuclear power.
There is also the issue of overproduction from renewables, which might threaten power surges in the electrical grid, and excess energy must essentially be dumped out of the grid, wasting its potential usefulness.
While battery technology has made strides in recent years, we aren't at the point where large-scale energy storage is possible. Until then, renewables' intermittency problems stand in the way of widespread adoption.
That is the challenge that researchers at the University of Southern California are trying to solve with a novel solution: information batteries.
Information what?
The idea of an information battery isn't that strange if you think about it. The problem we are trying to solve is to make renewables more consistently productive. The whole reason we produce energy is to convert it into some kind of practical work, whether that's driving a car's motor, running your home's air conditioning system, or powering a Google data center.
While the long-term solution to providing all of these with renewable power is traditional battery technology, there are steps we can take to speed things along. That's where information batteries come into play.
"The way things are going, in five years, the amount of renewable power wasted in California each year will be equivalent to the amount of power L.A. uses each year," said Barath Raghavan , an assistant professor in computer science at USC's Viterbi School of Engineering.
Finding a productive use for the excess energy could go a long way toward balancing the power demands put on renewables during periods of low power generation. The idea is to effectively move that energy use from periods of underproduction forward into periods of overproduction and store the result of that work for later use.
You can't really do that with a car or an air conditioner, but you can do that with data processing, which is where the information battery concept comes in.
Storing energy from renewables is hard, but storing data is incredibly easy, so rather than store the energy from a solar panel that a data center might use at night, have the data center perform predictable computations during periods of overproduction. Then the data center can store those results until they are needed later, which is a much less energy-intensive operation.
"We had the observation that if we can predict possible computations that might occur in the future, we can do those computations now, while there is energy available, and store the results, which now have embodied energy," Raghavan said.
How could you predict computing work ahead of time?
One of the key features of the information battery idea, which Raghavan and Jennifer Switzer, a Ph.D. student at the University of California, San Diego, describe in a recent paper published in the ACM Energy Informatics Review , is that a lot of computational work is known in advance.
"Imagine a large computational task is like a big jigsaw puzzle, where each piece is a chunk of computation," Raghavan told TechRadar this week. "You could do it all at once – a one-piece puzzle – if you know what all the computation will be in advance. But often you don't know 100% of what a future task will be. So instead you could imagine fragmenting that large computation into many smaller puzzle pieces.
"While not all can be done in advance, many can be. So only a small amount needs to be done in real time (the few small pieces that weren't pre-computable), with the rest taking advantage of speculatively executed computed pieces."
What's more, many of those computations are likely to be reusable for different applications or computations, so the energy savings from the repetitive, real-time computing work can really start to add up.
Doesn't it cost energy to store all that data?
Yes, but not nearly on the same scale.
To read, write, or otherwise interact with the information battery, you would obviously need to expend energy. But with long-term storage, once data is written to the battery and indexed to make it easily accessible, the energy cost to use it is minuscule compared to the energy required to recompute that same data in real time.
"It depends on the storage medium and the type of computation, but we're talking far, far more efficient in general," Raghavan told us.
"As a very rough calculation (very much back of the envelope), a high-end server hard disk has an embodied energy of about 2 GJ, which is a little more than a smartphone and would work out to about 1 kJ/MB in steady state, and the MB here is the output data (which will have the embodied energy of the computation).
"Its operational power use is small – about 4W."
Would that energy savings add up enough to bridge renewable energy's intermittency problem? Maybe not enough on its own, given how the amount of energy required to run the world's computers is growing at a rapidly accelerating rate. But before we can really talk about producing more energy, making sure we fully utilize the energy we're producing is a major step in the right direction.
How to watch Women's Ashes 2022: live stream Australia vs England ODIs from anywhere
After a breathtaking climax to their Test match last weekend, the Australia and England women's cricket teams turn their attention once again to the white-ball game. With three ODIs to finish off the series and the Ashes still up for grabs, we explain how to get a Women's Ashes live stream and watch Australia vs England no matter where you are in the world.
After the recent ignominious defeat for the men's team Down Under, Captain Heather Knight and her England team are hoping to restore some pride as they take on the Aussies for the Women's Ashes. And Meg Lanning's team is standing in their way.
The perfect primer for the 2022 Women's Cricket World Cup in March, this multi-format series takes in three T20s, followed by one four-day Test match and three ODIs.
After first blood went to the Australians - in the form of a 9-wicket T20i thrashing, lit up by the awesome Tahlia McGrath - the next two were washed out. What followed was one of the greatest adverts for women's cricket in the form's history, with a remarkable Test match in Canberra that eventually ended in a nail-biting draw.
Follow our guide for all you need to know to watch a 2022 Women's Ashes live stream no matter where you are - and, perhaps best of all, fans in Australia can watch the Ashes free on TV on Channel 7 . Kayo Sports is how to watch the Ashes online and on your mobile wherever you are.
2022 Women's Ashes schedule: dates and times
ODIs:
February 3, Canberra: 2.10pm AEDT (local time) / 3.10am GMT / 4.10pm NZDT / 10.10pm ET / 7.10pm PST / 8.40am IST
February 6, Melbourne: 10.05am AEDT (local time) / 11.05am GMT / 12.05pm NZDT / 6.05pm ET / 3.05pm PST / 4.35am IST
How to watch the Women's Ashes FREE: live stream in Australia
How to watch a Women's Ashes live stream in the UK
How to watch the Women's Ashes from outside your country
Below we've got you covered with your official broadcasting options for major cricket loving countries (and the US!), but if you're outside your country of residence and try to start streaming Women's Ashes cricket via your local broadcaster, you'll soon discover that you can't, as it's location restricted. But there is a way to tune in regardless.
By downloading and installing a VPN , you can effectively trick your computer into thinking that it's back at home. That way you can enjoy your home coverage without having to find an illegal stream - assuming you comply with the broadcaster's fine print, of course - specifically its terms and conditions.
Use a VPN to live stream Women's Ashes cricket from anywhere
Using a VPN is as easy as one-two-three...
1. Download and install a VPN - as we say, our top choice is ExpressVPN
2. Connect to the appropriate server location - open the VPN app, hit 'choose location' and select the appropriate location
3. Go to the broadcaster's stream - head to your home broadcaster's site or app and watch as if you were at home - so that's Kayo Sports for Aussies .
How to live stream 2022 Women's Ashes in New Zealand
Women's Ashes cricket live stream: where to watch Australia vs England in the US (and Canada)
What is the format of the 2022 Women's Ashes?
This Women's Ashes series is a multi-format affair which sees four points awarded for a victory in the Test and two for an ODI or T20 win.
The action kicks off with three T20s on January 20, 22 and 23 in Adelaide followed by a one-off Test from January 26 in Canberra, before culminating in a three-match ODI series.