this is bbc news. the headlines: the uk hasjoined a growing list of countries imposing new covid restrictions on arrivals from china in response to a surge in infections. england will require a negative pre—departure test from next week. the controversial online influencer andrew tate has been remanded into custody for 30 days in romania, along with his brother. the pair were arrested on thursday as part of an investigation into allegations of human trafficking and rape. six years of donald trump's tax returns that he had refused to make public have been released in the us. they confirm that the former president paid no tax in 2020. cristiano ronaldo has signed to play for the saudi arabian side al—nassr. it is thought his contract

is worth $200 million a year, making it the biggest ever signed by a footballer. now on bbc news, click. this week, we are celebrating 100 years of the bbc in 23 minutes. we will look at the secrets behind the broadcasting technologies that changed the world. a radio legend talks about legendary radio. i used to set my watch by the pips. my favourite pip is always the last one. lara watches tv with friends. i guess the idea is we're not actually meant to be in the same place.

and in the quest for greener energy, 0mar discovers a tasteless fluid called water. it goes in your mouth and then disappears? today we are literally stepping into history. we are at alexandra palace and this place has seen it all. that's the studio in there. 2022 marks 100 years of the bbc. goodness me. what began with a single radio transmission has transformed into a global broadcaster. in that time, it has covered the biggest events of successive generations, working to inform, educate and entertain the nation. and throughout those hundred years, the bbc has been pushing the boundaries of broadcasting, embracing and sometimes even creating the latest technology. 100 years of broadcasting. it is amazing when you think of it. you don't look a day over 30. and this studio in alexandra palace has a very special place in bbc history. in 1936 the bbc television service was launched right here on this spot.

performers and orchestra would have been here. and a huge camera here! singing and what viewers saw was this. this is adele dixon performing with the bbc television 0rchestra. she is singing a song called television which was written especially for the opening night of... television. it was broadcast to viewers across london and the home counties through the transmitter on alexandra palace, marking the beginning of what was then referred to as high definition television. yeah, don't laugh. before that, television was just an odd fuzzy experiment small, selected audiences. and behind—the—scenes there was a bit of a battle going on. see, the bbc had actually opened up two studios at alexandra palace. this, studio b was a mechanical system which was made byjohn logie baird and it produced an image like this. meanwhile, in studio a, they were trailing an electrical system by emi and what they would do

as they would alternate studios and systems on different days so they could compare the results and it turned out that emi's images at 25 frames per second were double the quality of the baird system. it had other advantages too. the baird camera was enormous. that emi one was somewhat more portable. and if you are filming with the baird system you need quite a lot of make up too. well, this is how it was, playmates. black and white, you see? and a bit of blue down each side of the nose. very sexy. the emi system on the other hand could capture a well lit studio perfectly fine, so the winner really wasn't hard to choose. under the lid of the emitron

was this, a cathode—ray tube which is basically an old tv working in reverse, capturing the pictures instead of showing them. it stayed in use without much change for many, many years. the coronation of king george vi was the first time the cameras were used outside and the broadcast was watched by about 50,000 viewers. however, it was the coronation of his daughter that really brought television into our homes. 70 years later, many millions of us watched the queen's funeral on smart tvs, phones, laptops, or on huge screens around the country, demonstrating just how far technology has moved on. but now, let's go back before the time of television to the very beginnings of the bbc in 1922. of course, way before television came radio and what do you need to broadcast a voice to the nation? you are going to need

one of these. and one of the most iconic mics ever is the bbc—marconi type a and when i say iconic, it is an icon. literally. one of our colleagues, joe leates, really, really loves this microphone so we sent him to the archives to see what he could dig up. not many are around these days, especially ones that work, as it became tradition at the corporation to empty the insides and plate them with gold as leaving presents for announcers. but what a thing to have on your mantelpiece. the good news, though, is here at the bbc, we have plenty. you'll notice it looks pretty hefty and it's actually really big, so it tended to stay in studios and leave the world travel to its smaller counterparts. but what it missed in adventure, it made up

for in the circles it socialised in. it played host to film—maker alfred hitchcock, poet ts eliot, legendary author hg wells and that's charlie chaplin. british singer and legend petula clark began her career aged nine in front of a type—a. now, lads, it's time to send along personal messages and greetings to you.... it was just to say hello, we are ok, don't worry about us, and give them a little bit of home news and that was it. during rehearsal there was the most enormous air raid and the producer asked if one of the kids could come up and sing a song or say a piece of poetry to calm things down. so i go up on stage and they put a box so that i could reach the microphone, it was one of those big bbc microphones, you know.

singing petula clark there. so while setting off singing careers and directing the second world war the microphone was clearly doing something right operationally, too. eyes had been on the groundbreaking ribbon microphone invented by rca, the radio corporation of america but it was a little too expensive. so in true bbc form, they made their own for less than 10% of what rca were charging. nice going. the type—a stayed in use by the bbc from 1934— 1959, a whole 25 years. that is a long time when technology was developing so rapidly. so what about inside?

the type—a is called a ribbon microphone. that's because behind the perforated cover is exactly that, a ribbon of metal. with the help of one of the trusty bbc engineering manuals, we can see that soundwaves come in from either the front or the back and hit the ribbon in the middle. so thin that it flexes and wiggles when the noise vibrations in the air hit it, just like your eardrum. the flexing moves the ribbon through a magnetic field created by two magnets on either side. doing this generates a very small voltage which is unique to the sound it is taking in. the microphone then connects to studio equipment that amplifies this up to a level that you can hear, and because the ribbon is a flat piece of metal, it can interpret vibrations from both sides. finally, of course, we want to hear a bit more of how the microphone sounds. well we can hear it in use by sirjohn snagge, the bbc voice who made the first announcement of the d—day landings, and who went on to become one of the first bbc television news readers.

he specially recorded with the microphone for this demo tape. this speech is recorded from a bbc—marconi velocity ribbon microphone, type axbt. i will leave it to you then to make up your own mind for how that sounds. for lack of time, it was not possible to... static joe there. now, if you are a fan of radio, i mean, really a fan of radio, then you will know what this is. pips they are called the pips and when you hear them, you will know it is something o'clock. i find them quite soothing. but have you ever wondered why they exist? ships. the pips tell ships what time it is and help them navigate. at the height of the british empire, britain had a lot more ships than anyone else anywhere in the world and their maps all needed to follow a strict format so they could figure out where they were.

the centre of all british nautical charts was the greenwich meridian, 0 degrees, and each vessel also kept a fancy clock on board that told them local time at the meridian and helped them to calculate their position really precisely. but over long journeys, how could the captains keep those clocks accurate to the second? well, to bring in the new year in 1923, the bbc ran an experiment to broadcast the midnight bongs of big ben on the radio. it was a bonging success and the following year the first fully accessible time signal, the greenwich time signal, started to be broadcast every hour and it hasn't stopped since. the pips, as they were known, were generated by a swinging pendulum fitted with electrical contacts. so now you could have accurate greenwich mean time literally anywhere that you had a radio.

the pips have become legendary, a symbol of bbc radio, and who better to tell us about them than another legend of bbc radio, tony blackburn. archive: welcome along - to the tony blackburn show this morning for this tuesday the ninth of december. my thanks, as always tojohn dunn for swinging us up until the seven o'clock hour. the pips have always been a favourite of mine since 1967 when ijoined the bbc and opened up radio 1. archive: good morning everyone, welcome to the exciting news - hour of radio one. everybody else finds it a bit weird that i like them but i do. i love them. on my programmes, i used to promote them, particularly as my favourite pip is always the last one because it is slightly extended. it is very bbc but they were very useful at one time because before all of these smart watches you would just have an ordinary watch which used to probably lose a minute a day or something like that. so i used to set my watch by the pips. nowadays of course with

the smart watches and things like that you don't need it quite so much but it is still very bbc and i still like it, i wouldn't want to see it disappear. archive: and off we go with | the next one and what a lovely sound this is as well. the original clock that kept the time still sits in the in the museum at the royal 0bservatory. in the 60s, though, an atomic clock started doing the job which stayed in use until the 1990s when it transmitted its last pips from the royal 0bservatory. ever since then, the bbc has generated its own pips from its atomic clock buried deep inside broadcasting house which uses gps signals to stay synchronised. so the next time you hear these, you know that they come from this. pips 0k, time for a look at this week's tech news now. first up, mark zuckerberg has

unveiled meta's new vr headset at its annual event held for developers. with a price tag ofjust under $1500, is almost four times the price of meta's current headset. the british artist damien hirst has begun burning hundreds of his own pictures as as part of an experiment to test the value of physical paintings versus digital works. buyers who bought pieces from his latest collection were asked to choose either the physical artwork or the nft representing it. those who chose the nfts were told their corresponding physical pieces would be destroyed. the nfts all cost e2000 and they all have the possibility of being traded in for a physical artwork and these ones are the ones that people decided not to trade in. could riding on roller—coasters cause phones to call emergency services? according to the wall street journal, six emergency calls were made at one us amusement park after rides caused new iphones to react as though

they had been in a crash. apple didn't deny the fault, and says the tech will continue to improve over time. and healthcare company haleon has teamed up with microsoft to make health products more accessible for blind people. in new enhancements to the free microsoft seeing ai app will provide important label information for more than 1,500 everyday products, including toothpaste and aspirin. birdsong and babbling water listen to that. gorgeous, innit? we all love a bit of nature, don't we? and programmes like springwatch, an annual tv show that watches british wildlife during the changing seasons, offer us a unique insight into these animals' lives. the thing is, for programmes like springwatch to run, it requires a lot of time, effort and equipment. with over 60 crew and 35 cameras, it is one of the biggest outside broadcasts

that the bbc offers, so it needs a lot of power. but in an effort to be more green and protect the wildlife they feature, springwatch has taken a number of measures to cut down their emissions, and we turned up to one of their production bases to see what they are. now, this is the big one — the green hydrogen generator. why is it called green hydrogen? because the process of electrolysis that's used to separate the hydrogen from water is powered by solar energy. if it was powered by fossil fuels, then it would be known as blue or black hydrogen. not so good — it kind of defeats the purpose. but with solar, you are using clean energy to make clean energy. compared to a diesel generator, it is a 3.5—tonne reduction based on what we normally do with a couple of weeks use. a couple of weeks, 3.5 tonnes? yeah, couple of weeks. geez! the only two things that this outputs is heat and brand—new water — the newest water in the universe. and this is it here — this is where it comes out.

it's all there is. it's brand new. it's absolutely pure. oh, it's drinkable! tastes the weirdest thing — there's no taste at all. what do you mean? 0k. nothing to it. no minerals, no nothing. you're not keen? no, it's fine — itjust goes in your mouth massive operation. so, this is the site we are working on — 4,000 acres that we've got access to, which is a huge to cover, so we've been doing is we've been putting fibre across the whole site, and as a way of trying to keep things down, working on c02, we put in the fibre once and leave it for the duration. and we have nodes up and down the site where we can connect to as we come back and go live. you must have your favourite name here, right? i know what my favourite is. we're going for that.

laughs. they also have solar—powered cameras that they've installed on sites, such as in this beehive here. so, there's a sustained effort across the site to lower emissions, but also off—site. a lot of producers are now utilising the work—from—home way of working, so they don't spend unnecessary fuel going to sites. and for the really remote sites, they're using solar panels to power up their recording set—ups. but there's also one more special thing about this system. it uses al to flag a clip when an animal appears and tries to identify it. so, this year, we've got got 32 wildlife cameras across the site. and all of those need to be monitored and logged for activity 2a hours a day. that's a fairly intensive process when it comes to labour, so bbc r&d have come up with al tools that will help identify different forms of wildlife. they are very accurate. species of birds are often quite distinct, so it's very good at identifying birds of particular different shapes and colours, so it does perform very, very well. now, these changes aren't without cost. as mentioned earlier,

the green hydrogen generator isn't normally as cheap as a diesel—powered one and new ways of working always require some adjustment but the team want to do what they can to set an example. it hasn't been seamless but they were very determined to take advantage of that new carbon—friendly technology and we pioneered it. using new technologies that have basically been pioneered in science and bringing them to media is, from my point of view, really exciting. and the guys in the van here, our story developers, we asked them to say, "was that the male, "was that the female, "that one, that one?" ai and all that technology that we have got is telling us instantaneously. but we are not going to save the world on our own, we're not going to save the reputation of the media we need sport, we need light entertainment, we need drama — we need — everyone's got to buy into this. change is never convenient or easy but the team here at springwatch are taking strides forward to help the bbc reach its goal of net zero greenhouse gas emissions

by 2030. and here's hoping when it comes to powering our devices, this is a sign of things to come. 0mar there in norfolk. meanwhile, at manchester's science and industry museum, 100 years of the bbc is being celebrated with an exhibit featuring broadcast artefacts, plus a few more recent additions. this funky—looking box was a prototype which was an early part of the bbc�*s research and development project for storing your data yourself. so, the idea was that the device would keep track of what you are listening to and what you were watching, but that data was just yours, unless you chose for it not to be. it was inspired by a new vision that sir tim berners—lee has for the web — to rethink the ownership of our data. back in 2018, he told us about what he calls a mid—course correction for the internet — an idea called solid.

so, instead, imagine a world where before you use an app, it says to you, "where do you want to store this data?" all across the data spectrum, you have complete control over your private and personal data, which is very exciting — an exciting vision, i think for those people who get an inkling of what it's going to be like. right now, when we interact with companies over we give them our data — lots of it. every website, app or streaming platform gathers information on us — our name and age, what we like to share, our files, photos — in fact, all of our online browsing habits. platforms use this data to create recommendations, improve algorithms or sometimes just for the purpose of selling it. but tim berners—lee's idea turns this on its head, giving power back to the individual. with solid, as users travel across the internet, all their data is stored in something called a pod.

this is an individual�*s data bank in the cloud, which only they, or those they give permission to, can see. so, instead of the data freely flowing to companies when they want to access it, they have to ask for the user's permission. if this is approved, they can look into the pod to view or add information. with pods, because you're in control, you can share what you've watched or listened to on one platform with the others — something the companies would never want you to be doing — but it means you could get more personalised recommendations. and if you want to stop using a service, you can cut off access to your data. or you could, even more dramatically, delete the pod, destroy all the data and remove all trace of anything you've ever done on the internet. yes, it is a big endeavour, but m not— a ridiculously huge endeavour. what's exciting right now is just at the point when we should be

broadcasting this, we now have also a start—up, inrupt. four years on, it's a reality with bbc r&d working with inrupt to bring it to life. charlie, you've invited me to a party, but this is no ordinary party. no, no, it's not. it's bbc together, it's a watch party, | but the particular difference i here is that your personal data is being protected in a new way. - watch parties allow friends to stream the same content at the same time, and they've exploded in the last few years. something like a third of under 30s actually had a watch party in the last 12 months and kind of it is really, really growing. so, we've kind of built on the bbc's watch party and added the data pod element to it. as users log in, behind the scenes, the software creates a pod for each person. press play, and here we go. and when you stop watching, this bbc trial shows you what data has

been collected. we couldn't do a watch party without storing . some data about you. the difference here is we're - storing that data away from us, in your pod that you control. it's notjust about entertainment — this is just one example of something you could do with this system. that's right, exactly. we've seen interest - from healthcare providers, where your health data - is incredibly personal to you — you don't want anybody getting access to that. i no, people are more obviously sensitive about that. exactly. there's a project in flanders happening at the moment . where some of your- educationalqualifications are being put into a pod. solid is just one of many ideas aiming to help us own our data. others, even allowing us to sell it, have failed to take off at scale — maybe the incentives haven't been right. but that could change. bbc r&d and tim berners—lee certainly think it might, and they have both been right before. and there you have it —

100 years of the bbc in 23 minutes. yep, you've been there for a fifth of it — 20 years. yeah, you're right. 0k! well, let's leave it there, shall we? thanks for watching and we'll see you in another hundred years. 0r hopefully sooner! yeah. bye! hello again. we've got some big weather contrasts around on saturday — which, of course, is new year's eve. now, for england and wales, it's going to be a mild day but there'll be some heavy rain around. colder air across northern areas and in scotland, that will bring some snow, so very different air masses across the country at the moment. strong south—westerly winds bringing the mild air across england and wales but the colder air in scotland

will continue to bring some snow showers in here. so, weather—wise, next few hours, risk of some icy stretches in scotland. could see a few centimetres of snow building in over the hills here in places. further southwards, we've got this area of rain around across england and wales but look at these temperatures as we head into the early morning on new year's eve — 10, 11, 12 degrees celsius. very, very mild indeed. and through the rest of saturday, it's going to stay mild across england and wales. there will be more rain coming and going. now, the grounds saturated across the south of england and wales and this rain could actually lead to some areas of localised surface water flooding. very mild — 12 to 1a degrees in places through the afternoon — but the colder air in scotland, where there will be some places that struggle to see temperatures much above freezing. now, running closer to those new year celebrations at midnight — hogmanay, of course — we've got this area of rain extending across northern ireland, northern england.

showers following to the south, where it stays quite breezy and mild. now, as this rain band starts to move into the colder air in scotland, we might actually start to see it turn to snow. there is quite a bit of uncertainty about this one but we could see some heavy snow notjust affecting some of the hillier areas but maybe also getting down to some lower levels. as i say, there is a degree of uncertainty in that kind of forecast, but stay in touch with the weather if you live in scotland and you're worried about those snowy conditions heading into new year's day. new year's day itself, it stays quite cold in scotland. any snow will slowly begin to fizzle in intensity. further southwards, we've got the mild air with us again. still a few showers around but those temperatures, 12, 13 degrees celsius — that's still around 5 celsius above the december average. now, beyond that, generally, those south—westerly winds will continue to blow across much of the uk well into the start of the new year, so it's going to be quite cloudy at times with outbreaks of rain. quite breezy but, on the whole, staying on the mild side. bye— bye.

welcome to bbc news. i'm vishala sri—pathma. our top stories: the ukjoins a growing list of countries imposing new covid restrictions on arrivals from china. the controversial online influencer andrew tate is remanded in custody in romania as part of an investigation into allegations of human trafficking and rape. donald trump's tax returns while he was president are released by the democrats, showing he paid zero during his last year in the white house. it's been a bad year for billionaires. their fortunes have gone down by more than $1 trillion. we'll look at who's become richer or poorer in 2022 and why. and brazil lights up in honour of pele on the first of three days of national mourning for the footballing legend.