hello this is bbc news. i'm luxmy gopal. the headlines: a growing number of countries restrict travel from southern africa in an effort to control a new covid variant, as europe records its first confirmed case. two people are killed as storm arwen batters the uk with strong winds, rain and snow. the former england cricket captain michael vaughan says he's "sorry for all the hurt" azeem rafiq went through during the yorkshire racism scandal. one of the 27 people who drowned in the channel on wednesday is named as 24—year—old maryam nuri mohammed amin from iraq. now on bbc news, it's time for click. this week: buying a forest on the blockchain — yes, it is �*nftrees�*. a one—minute covid test, and that's no gag. we'll take a call from the past — if we can lift the handset. and it's mars, it's the moon, it's the country that is out of this world. are you ready for today's teaser? go on, then! right, what does this penguin, this building in iceland, a huge digital artwork and this slamming basketball block all have in common? ah, our most loyal viewers might know! yes, they will. they've all turned up in our attempts to explain the blockchain — the buzzword of the decade, the things that of the decade, the thing that every business needs. does it really? no, but go with me. and the thing that is currently burning through more electricity than the country of argentina as people use blockchain technology to try and get rich on cryptocurrency. so the blockchain is a way of storing ownership records. it can prove that you own a bitcoin, a house or even a video clip. that proof is a unique token that is non—changeable, non—fungible — it is a non—fungible token, or nft. personally, i have always been sceptical of whether nfts are a sensible idea but there are plenty of people who've bought into them, literally. ownership rights for some digital artworks have gone for millions of dollars and collins dictionary has just made nft its word of the year. and just last week, a new development — a group of people got together and tried to crowdfund enough money to buy a printed copy of the us constitution at auction. they were outbid, despite claiming to raise $40 million. but had they been successful, each of the thousands of contributors would have had the right to vote on what happened to the historic document next. so they could vote to put it on public display. 0h! they could vote to sell it on, or anything in between. yes, and whatever they voted to do would have been handled by a decentralised autonomous organisation - a dao. but what on earth does that mean? a dao is similar in some ways to some of these a financial flash mobs or crowdsourcing activities, where you get a bunch of people coming together, they put some money into something to buy an asset. the difference is that in one of those activities, there are people who are recognisably running the show and are in charge of thinking it through. in a dao, we are defining it all upfront and then we're letting it run its own course. and this idea can be used for anything. a group of people have got together on the internet to raise funds for a dao to buy this area of woodland in wiltshire, in the south of england, and they can decide how it is managed. so a dao is a way of setting up an organisation that is — that uses the blockchain to sort of manage membership and let people organise around a particular cause or project. the treedao is this project to buy a woodland and then let the local community sort of take control of that woodland and vote on what happens to it, using the blockchain, using smart contracts. smart contracts, they sort of run automatically so that instead of having to appoint a treasurer and a secretary, people can use their membership tokens to vote on things. it's about being able to determine that you are — hold a vote in the governance of the forest so you can determine, you know, what's allowed to happen here and you can vote on, you know, making sure it does not get turned into firewood. i've been fascinated by the technology and how daos is a new way of organising people around projects and i wanted to see what you could do in terms of — like, there are daos that, you know, just live on the blockchain and don't interface with the real world and i really wanted to see what you could do, whether a dao could own a real world asset like a forest, and so this was sort of an experiment to see how this sort of new blockchain technology could interface with the real world. and i was just very lucky that, you know, i sent out a tweet on monday morning and we'd raised 100 f — which at the time was about £100,000 — by thursday morning and then we had to go and find a forest to buy, so we actually raised the money before we — before we started looking for a forest. yeah, a dao could be used for — or anything. it could be used for organising around a particular cause, or you could buy a football team, or you could use it to advocate for a particular change in the law. like, i think daos are gonna be a new way of people organising for sort of any — any reason, really. anyone can buy into the forest by purchasing an nft. it'll come with the gps co—ordinates of an exact spot in the woodland. but if people who live locally buy in, it also means that they have a say in an area that they use and love. i mean, one of the — one of the joys of the internet has always been that you can raise your hand and find people like you, wherever they are in the world. you know, tisbury�*s catchment area's like 6000 people. the advantage of this is that we can reach to anybody as far as you like who wants to protect woodlands. yeah, as you walk around the, you know, the woodland, as an owner, you know, it — it's subtle but a really important, you know, feeling. like, it feels like it's ours and i think the exciting thing is we can now bring that sense of ourness to other people — anyone who becomes an nftree holder. we've been waiting for this for 20 years and, you know, here it is. like anything to do with crypto and blockchain, there is a huge buyer beware to getting involved. some initiatives are legitimate but others are scams and sometimes, it can be very hard to tell the difference. treedao says that what it's doing shows how this new way of running things could be used responsibly and effectively. but it's early days for these ideas, so what daos really end up being used for could surprise us all. depending where you are in the world, whenever you enter a building or an event, you might be asked to do a rapid antigen test, a lateral flow test. now, the thing is these can take 15 minutes or more to do. but over here, i've got a test that is gone in 60 seconds. this is patrick von den bogaard. patrick, welcome. thank you. what do i have to do to do your 60—second test, then? first, i will give you a swab and ask you to let saliva pool underneath your tongue. and when that is done, you can put this in the pool and let it soak for about 15 seconds. this test is doubly unusual because it only uses saliva. it's no surprise, really, that quite a few people across the world are trying to develop an accurate and effective saliva—based test — one doesn't require nostril probing or gag—inducing throat swabs. the super—fast result here is achieved using nanotechnology. the idea is that by forcing a small amount of saliva into a tiny sensor the confined molecules in the saliva react with each other and create a readable solution much faster. the results can be analysed by a microscope in the machine. 0k, well, this has been cooking for more than a minute. it says its complete, so let's see what the result is. so the result is negative. can i just say this test says i am negative and the lateral flow i did today says the same thing. tests like these seem very impressive and if they work, they could really help to get things moving again. but the scientific community is still divided on whether saliva tests are effective enough to be used to detect covid. and previous tests which have been announced with much fanfare have been swiftly muted. in may, british airways announced trials of an ambitious 25—second covid saliva test, described as a game—changer by its ceo. but six months later, the test is still not available in the eu and has not been authorised by the fda. the advent of testing and vaccines has changed how we think about living with covid, and improving the testing experience further with technology like this might make it easier to control the virus. we just have to wait to see whether the outcome is positive or negative. hello and welcome to the week in tech. it was the week apple is suing the nso group, the firm behind pegasus spyware, over its use of surveillance software on the iphone. website provider godaddy�*s data breach has compromised over a million wordpress users on its platform. and hello from the b—side as adele gets spotify to remove the shuffle icon from her album pages. an electric aircraft made by rolls—royce is awaiting verification as the fastest electric plane on the planet. the spirit of innovation did not break the sound barrier, but 387mph is still blisteringly fast! the company now awaits formal world record certification. the uk government has introduced legislation to make smart devices harder to hack. this includes banning default passwords for internet—connected devices, and firms which do not comply will be fined. now, do you remember yourfirst mobile phone? oh, the nostalgia and the battery life! well, now, over2,000 old models have been put in a mobile phone museum for safekeeping. and although it is generally an online venue, chris fox went to its glitzy london launch this week. i'm here at the launch of the mobile phone museum in london, a collection of more than 2,000 unique mobile phones from history, and i'm here with the curator ben wood. you're going to take me down a little trip on memory lane. i'd love to show you all 2,120 phones but what we're gonna do today is pick a few out, and we've got some collections that we've curated for the museum tonight and the first one is what we consider one of the ugliest phones in the collection. 0h, 0k! wow. whoever designed this will be upset! 0h, not this! laughs. now, i think i knew people at school who had this and it looks very cool, butjust totally impractical to text on. so this is the nokia 7600. it was nokia's first commercial 3g phone and, as you said, it was at the time when texting was very popular and i guess there was an idea that you could text using your thumbs down the side but it was counter—intuitive. but look at it — i mean, it is not really a thing of beauty. other phones in the ugly collection include the ntt personal, which won a design award back in 1995 but due to its shape is now known as the toilet seat phone. and this is the i—kid's sf from 2006 which has rabbit ears to make it appeal to children. 0h! gasps. wait, is this...? is this from tomorrow never dies? it is! ah! i love this! and this must open up into... gasps. i remember this — you can drag yourfinger across and drive the car. also, we have the fingerprint scanner here, so you may remember in the film that was done. also, there was a magical screwdriver that you could use to open a safe. does it also do the "recall, three, send"? the piece de resistance, which is very difficult to make ina model... yeah! the taser! both laugh. other movie phones in the collection include the nokia 8110 banana phone from the matrix, nokia's first slider phone. the version in the movie was spring—loaded but the real one, you had to open by hand. and this white sony ericsson is another bond phone — this one owned by vesper lynd in casino royale. i want to show you a phone which was the phone which the first mobile phone call in the uk was made on. this is the vodafone vt1. a phone call was made onjanuary 1, 1985. so the numbers are on here... yep! ..and then you... hello? just check out the weight. oh — oh, wow, ok. so where do i put the apps? oh, you might struggle with the apps on that one! this was my favourite category because there were so many world firsts, like the ibm simon, blending computer—style features with a phone. it is widely considered one of the first smartphones of a sort — although it was not branded as one in 1993. sharp'sj—phone from the year 2000 is considered by the museum to be the first full—camera phone. terribly low resolution by today's standards, but it sold out in two weeks injapan. it had a mirror on the back for taking selfies. first android looked very different from today's phones with a full physical keyboard but in many ways, the first iphone does not look that different from today's devices. and this was the first pocketable phone from 1986, at a time when mobiles were typically still bricks. its designer, nils martensson, was one of the special guests i met at the museum. we had commissioned stanford research in america to forecast how many cellular telephones there would be in america year 2000. and they came back with the expensive report and said, "we think that there may be as many as 30,000 in america by year 2000". and i think had they said 30 million, they would have been a little off the mark, even with that figure. we're going to go into the world of luxury. ooh, 0k. this is the xor phone. now, the challenge i have for you is you have to open it. i'm guessing it has to do with these like — are they buttons? they are. yeah? push in. eh! so? and here it is. this is a £4,000 luxury phone with ruby crystals in here, sapphire crystal glass, beautifully polished titanium. does it do anything fancy? the joy of this phone, and for the target market, is the fact that it doesn't do anything fancy. no camera. celebrities, very high net worth individuals hate camera phones. everyone�*s going to know this one. we're on bestsellers. is it going to be the 3310? let's see. there it is, yep. old and trusty. trusty and hardy. 3310. controversial, i actually think the 3210 looks better. that's the one i had and i never upgraded because i thought the other one looked — like, this looked cheaper somehow. but... but a phenomenal commercial success — 126 million phones sold, the equivalent of the japanese population. every single person would have one. it's iconic. and do you know what? it's the one phone when i take it to the museum and show people, everyone knows the 3310. this is mars as we have never seen it before. the perseverance rover and ingenuity helicopter tag team are giving us brand—new insights into what's going on above and below the surface of the red planet. but how should we prepare for living on other worlds — for the next giant leap for mankind? well, you could take a small step to iceland. this country is like nothing i've seen anywhere else. it's barren, rocky, volcanic and icy — in other words, like the surface of the moon, mars, titan, lo and other worlds we may one day land on. and that's why over the summer, a group of researchers brought a mock—up spacesuit here to investigate what it might be like to perform extra—terrestrial missions in the future. the suits have a lot of restrictions in terms of how your body can move, what you can actually feel or operate with your fingers. so there are a lot of challenges and restrictions for operating equipment and, as a result, for doing proper field research, so if you're not wearing a suit that is restricting some of those operations, then you don't really know how to problem solve and create the instruments that are going to be able to be operated properly in the field on either the moon or mars. scientists call landscapes which are analogous to other planets �*analogues�* and daniel leeb and gunnar gudjonsson are trying to promote iceland as a place to do this kind of research. so they formed a two—person operation that they are calling the iceland space agency. iceland has some of the most diverse set of terrestrial analogues in close proximity to one another that exist anywhere on the planet. so you could be on mars, then you could drive down the road and be on something similar to the moon? that's right. in 1965 in 1967, the original apollo astronauts came here to iceland because they believed that the — that the terrestrial analogues that existjust north of vatnajokull glacier, around askja volcano, would be most similar to where they would be landing on the surface of the moon. and when those astronauts eventually landed on the moon, they realised "wow — this looks a lot like iceland". needn�*t have gone all that way, then! yep. but seriously, today, i have been taken to an analogue which could be very similar to ourfirst home on an alien world. the last place that you'd want to live on the moon or on mars is on the surface. the atmosphere of mars is toxic, the soil is poisonous and abrasive and it will cut through your suit and stick to your equipment. it has a thin atmosphere and no real magnetic field, so it can't protect you from meteorites or solar radiation. so if you want to live on the moon or mars, the best place to do it is underground. we're in a lava tube — a hollow tunnel formed when hot lava melted its way through the surface, leaving behind a roof of cooling rock and an empty space after the lava flowed on downhill. and instead of having to drill out underground shelters, lunar and martian lava tubes would create ready—made protection from the hazards above. we know without any question that there was volcanism on the surface of mars and, in fact, the largest volcano in our solar system exists at olympus mons, which is a volcano so high that the peak actually pierces through the atmosphere of mars. wow. yeah. and in the whole area of the basin around the volcano — olympus mons — it is believed there are certainly lava tubes. here's something else that's really exciting about this lava tube. now, mars is red because there is a lot of iron in the rocks. and that white glistening stuff there, that is icelandic cave bacteria. it doesn't need any light to live. it can survive in near—freezing temperature. it just feeds off the iron and the sulphur in the rocks down here, away from everything else. so what we think is that if there are lava tubes on mars, there could be life in there, too. next, daniel is keen to show me another terrestrial analogue a couple of hours�* drive from the lava tube, and this one is even more extreme. we're going under the ice to an environment of very different challenges. we think about the lava tube that we visited earlier — that's a ready—made structure perfect for potential habitat. whereas the analogue we're currently in, here in the ice tunnel, this is a wonderful place to do isolated confined extreme environments to test various challenges that have to do with cold weather and isolation. how important is it that we find and use water ice on the moon and mars? finding frozen water is fundamental for long—term human exploration on a heavenly body. you can see it goes all the way up there. we can convert the ice — that water, h2o — into hydrogen for rocket fuel, oxygen for breathing, and water, obviously, for drinking, and for growing produce in greenhouses. it's beautiful down here — too beautiful. even though it's cold and wet and slippery, it has pretty lighting and it has an ice mobile at the end of it, ready to take me back to my hotel. this is not the life of a new world pioneer. being here today has really brought one thing home, and that's how extreme it's going to be for any astronaut trying to conquer the new world. iceland's not even the most extreme place on this planet, and it is so harsh. now, imagine moving around with a big spacesuit on, with a toxic atmosphere, and you're trying to build a new home from scratch. the people that do it, they're going to be heroes. i'll see you later. gosh. that's it from spencer in the snow, and me in the forest. as ever, you can keep up with the team on social media throughout the week. find us on youtube, facebook, instagram, and twitter — @bbcclick. thanks for watching. bye bye. hello there. storm arwen has brought damage and disruption to many parts of the uk. and it's no wonder when we look at the sort of wind gusts we had over night. very close to 100mph in parts of north—east england. but south—west england, northern ireland, wales, many areas had exceptionally strong winds and some impacts from this storm system. the area of low pressure responsible has been moving very close to the uk with that swathe of really strong northerly winds, and also some areas of rain, sleet and snow, and a few places have seen a fair bit of snow. this is a weather watcher picture from the west midlands earlier on this morning. you can see there was a covering of snow first thing. that snow has been also affecting parts of northern england, some parts of scotland. as we go through the day, this area of rain, sleet and snow will track very slowly eastwards across england, much of the snow over higher ground, mainly rain to low levels. brightening up towards the west. northern ireland and scotland having a mix of sunny spells and showers, but though showers wintry even to a quite low levels in scotland. it stays windy. the winds ease a little bit in those places where it has been so blustery so far, but it is still going to be blustery out there this afternoon. so when we factor in the strength of the wind, it is going to feel really cold, even on the thermometer temperatures no better than 3—8 degrees. tonight, some wet and wintry weather will continue across parts of eastern england. cloud will bring some rain into western parts of northern ireland, some more snow fall into parts of north—west scotland. but in between with clear skies temperatures will plummet. —6 or —7 likely in places, so with wet surfaces and still some lying snow, ice could be a problem tomorrow morning. through tomorrow we are likely to see some sleet or snow tracking its way eastwards across scotland. this zone of cloud bringing a bit of patchy rain to northern ireland, fringing into the west of wales, the far south—west of england, still some wintry showers dipping into eastern parts of england. but for many places, tomorrow is drier, brighter and calmer with lots of sunshine. but it will still feel cold. that will change a little bit into the start of the new week because our weather will no longer be coming in from the north. it will be coming in from the west. a milder place for our weather to approach from. so temperatures will climb. 11, 12 degrees by tuesday. but still some outbreaks of rain at times. good afternoon and welcome to bbc news. health officials in several european countries are checking to see if the newly identified variant of coronavirus has already arrived within their borders.