Let There Be Light Click

of Borneo has plummeted by half,

almost 150,000.

Now it's time for Click.

This week, dancing with the stars,

laughing with the stars and...

Skinny-dipping in the Himalayas!

Choose Wi-Fi, choose Snapchat,

choose a pre- ordered backyard with

arm and milk, juice likes, choose

follows, choose pizza delivered by a

drone, is quite bright, swipe left,

follow, follow, follow. We are

constantly being bombarded with

updates, twigs and information. We

are glued to our phones, addicted to

digital status and even smashing up

our gadgets, obliterating them to

pieces in a violent quest to rid

ourselves of this virtual

assistants. How self-imposed

restraints. Well, it's time to get

away from all that, just for if you

minutes. This week, Justin Rowlatt

travelled thousands of miles to a

village in the Himalayas which is

getting electricity for the first

time by enhancing the power of the

sun.

I've joined the team hiking up the

frozen Zanskar River. We've got an

eight day 140 kilometre trek ahead

of us. Our destination, a village

which has around 50 people, for

houses huddled together, under

granite cliffs. For hundreds of

years the only light of the dark was

the thin flicker from oil lamps.

Tanzin struggles to cook in the dim

light.

TRANSLATION: These

traditional lights are not portable

and they don't cover enough area for

the children to read. It also causes

pollution. If we had solar power it

would be much better for us.

The

next morning and the team gets to

work. This is the satellite dish and

take a look at this. It has taken

quite a beating along the way. It

will be interesting to see if this

works.

This is a street light.

20

watts. A complete grid?

Because you

get wild animals in the summer and

winter. This is a charge controller.

Tying the grid together is over 550

metres of wiring, but there's a

problem.

The wire is very thick and

it is frozen.

It's so cold. It's

about minus 15.

Yes, we need to warm

this for about half an hour so that

it can be usable.

His team is hard

at it, threading cables through the

tightest nooks and crannies. Each

home is topped off with a shimmering

solar panel.

This is a solar panel and the

capacity of the solar panel is 260

watts. This panel is a

polycrystalline panel. At any

coverage it can charge the batteries

very well.

So even when it is

freezing, as it is now, it will

still generate electricity?

The

beauty of this is even at low

temperatures it gives a better

current. So it gets better? It gets

better.

It is like a high altitude

desert, so it gets Sunbury-on-Thames

50 days in a year?

Yes any one day

it gets nine hours of sunlight. In

winter it get six hours and proper

sunlight.

Generating as much power

as possible is only the half of it.

The other issue is making sure no

power is wasted. What's more, the

solar panels don't just passively

drip DC into a battery, this system

has a brain. Remote motion sensors

ensure what's generated laughs. The

idea is you don't have to remember

to turn the lights off, as soon as

you leave the room the lights go

off. The sunsets... And it is almost

ready to go. The new solar micro

grid is a big deal for the

villagers. There is an elaborate

ceremony. The local Buddhist monk

says a prayer for the system. And

then it's time to throw the switch!

The hope is the new grid can ensure

the future of the village.

That added satellite dish does work

of the role and so... Does the

motion sensor.

A local Himalayan expedition has

installed over 250 micro grid is in

outlying areas of Ladakh. -- the

Global Himalayan Expedition. After

Hanamur we visited one specifically

designed to light up the minds of

schoolchildren. It is at the

government higher secondary school.

Hallow, kids! They've got an

innovative computer system and what

I'm going to do is test it by asking

you a fuse simple questions. So I'm

going to write them on the board and

then you fire up the computers and

we will get to work.

OK, Sir!

Here

we go.

That's right. Get to work! It might

look like they are online, but they

are actually scouring through an

off-line internet. So even without a

data connection, these children will

learn the sort of research skills

essential for finding out

information in a connected world and

of course it all runs of solar

power. There's half a terabyte of

memory on here and installed on here

is all of Wikipedia, Ted talks, all

sites of encyclopaedias and works,

works that the kids can use in order

to research all sorts of subjects.

At the heart of the system. But this

is the key to keeping it lower

power. This is a UK developed

computer system. Incredibly

low-energy, drives the keyboard and

the mouse. This is the computer they

use. What it means is they can have

up to ten of these bright LED

screens all running on 24 bolts, so

very, very efficient -- vaults. Time

is up! We need answers. I'm going to

pick on you.

He was the last king of

the Empire.

What do you think of

this system?

How does it work? It

works very well. I get many

knowledge from it.

It's very useful

and easy to operate. I think it's

perfect for students of mountain

areas.

Solar micro grid is a great

fit for Ladakh, where steepling

geography has scattered communities

and made them difficult to reach

with powerlines. 1.2 million people

globally live without electricity

and for many of them solar is a

perfect solution too because we've

seen it can be rolled out almost

anywhere under the sun. It feeds the

demand for electricity without

eating up the planet.

But there is a rather unfortunate

tradition at the end of the track.

That's right. A deep -- dip.

Welcome to the week Intech. It was

the week that the UK government

unveiled an artificial intelligence

tool for blocking extremist content

online. And it's not just airspace

that are going to be occupying in

any future, researchers at a

university in North Carolina have

developed a drone that can fly

through the air and propel itself

underwater. Plus the Winter Olympics

website was frozen by a cyber attack

during the Opening Ceremony. And a

robot got to compete in its own

Olympics. 18 downhill skiing droids

went on to the slopes, competing for

a $10,000 prize. Boston Dynamics is

at it again with a demo guaranteed

to freak most people out. It's Robo

dog can now open doors. That's one

less obstacle in the fight world

domination. And a pig farm in China

is using AI to bring home the bacon.

The AI measures animal health and

behaviour, which the developers

Alibaba hope will improve farming

efficiency. And finally a coin might

be preventing us from making contact

with aliens. Researchers complained

this week that the price of key

computer chips have been driven

through the roof by demand from

crypto currency miners, with no

price drop on site we will all just

have to watch this space.

Fashionably late, Apple has decided

it wants a slice of the home speaker

market, finally releasing its home

pod, sometime after the first ones

hit the shelves. They've gone for

the same cylindrical shape as Google

and Amazon but it looks more like a

premium high-end speaker that either

of -- than either of those systems.

The amount of audio work Apple have

done on this device means its key

selling point is as a speaker. It is

impressive, with a full rich upper

facing woofer and seven tweeters,

each with its own amplifier, meaning

it can push sounds in different

directions. So it sounds exactly the

same wherever you are in the room,

but what it doesn't do is give you

the opportunity to change the levels

in any way. If I wanted to push the

base up right now there is no way of

me doing that. And even in a space

this big, the sound really carries.

What is interesting though is even

at 100% volume I can't even hear

myself think and it can still hear

my voice. Siri, pause. Just like

that. Where is Apple is going to

sound quality, Amazon seems to be

focusing on different features.

Their Echo Spot is all about the

screen. It now has the ability to

make video calls, as well as doing

the usual like play music, Kelly the

weather and even boil your kettle if

you've got a smart home setup. But

really it comes into its own as a

very nice alarm clock. It's not just

a function that makes this home

assistance different, but price is

another factor. While we Echo Spot

costs £119, the home pod will set

you back £319. The home pod ties chi

Wintune Apple, so instead of being

able to access any music streaming

service by voice activation for

example you can only use Apple music

in this way. If you wanted the 70

million Spotify subscribers would

have to go into your phone and use

Air Pay as a workaround, essentially

turning this speaker into a... Well,

speaker. And as people have been

discovering one that might leave a

nasty white park on wooden tops.

Apple's response? Choose a different

surface, or get a cloth and some

elbow grease.

Over the next few weeks we are going

to be talking to some of the gods of

the visual affects world. Last week

we went behind the scenes of Blade

Runner and this week it is the turn

of the Guardians of the Galaxy

volume two and we started by talking

about it is truly bonkers opening

sequence.

The beginning of the sequence

features a title sequence with

dancing in the foreground. And it

doesn't cut. It is on Groot the

whole time. He has to hold their

viewers with his crazy little

dancer, while what happens in the

background never stops. We have

something like or thousand frames of

continuous action. -- 4000 frames.

We were faced with the fact that the

environment was completely

spectacular and had to be created

entirely digitally.

spectacular and had to be created

entirely digitally. Everything that

we were inserting had to be

reflected and that is multiple times

the computation to compute the light

on them and also their reflection.

Everything ended up being done two

or three times, because of the

surface of the world they were

standing on. We were delighted to

have the opportunity to take on

Rocket at the raccoon. The first

aid, the muscle systems, all of

these things had updated in the

three years between the first

Guardians and this one. We wanted to

bring all about into Rocket, which

meant rebuilding him from the ground

up. And yet making sure that he was

absolutely recognisable as the same

character from the first movie.

Space being very open, it is very

hard to tell how fast things are

moving. James Cameron is very keen

on selling the speed of the action.

So we conceived of these sort of

wasps and waves of plasma energy

that lived in and around this planet

is so we could sell how fast the

camera and the spaceships were

moving -- wafts. There is a scene in

the middle of the movie where Rocket

and Yonder are in prison, but when

they break out they are on-board

this enormous, very big spaceship.

Which of course didn't exist. We had

big shots of Yondu walking through

these hallways and docking bays with

all of the ravages of the crew of

the spaceship being shot out with

his arrow. Ultimately, the arrow

which Yondu is firing works its way

all the way around the spaceship. We

had to design the interior of the

spaceship to give a satisfying

journey for this arrow to take. It

looks like a Busby Berkeley movie,

with crazy camera angles. Every

movie that we get involved in we

want to be pushing the envelope,

putting something new, with

expectation that we will get there.

Old film stock is a treasure trove

of historical information. In the

case of old BBC programmes it can be

a race against time to find any

remaining copy and digitise it or

risk losing it forever. But when

producer Charles Norton was given an

old Morecambe and Wise episode there

was a problem.

After this that both

the BBC in the British Film

Institute have a look at the film

and essentially judged it to be

unable to be recovered. They were,

effectively it was going to be

thrown out. The pictures inside that

film, they are still there, they

still printed on the plastic, but

they are all locked inside this

permanently fused block of immobile

gunk, which, sooner or later, we'll

just rot away to soup.

So Charles

brought the film to Queen Mary

University's dental department to

use that x-ray machine to see

through the love of decaying film to

be precious pictures within. But now

they had another problem. The film

was too big to be X-Raid.

The only

thing you could do would be to cut

the film into little pieces and scan

Monfils at a time I didn't expect

him to say yes to cutting up the

film, but given the alternative was

watching this just rapidly

disintegrate, he said let's do it.

We were using an infrared laser, it

generated a lot of heat,

occasionally there were flames. At

the best we had a little bit of

damage at the age of the frames, at

worst we lost whole frames.

Frame

took 5000 images of each chunk as it

rotated through 360 degrees to make

a 3-D model. At that point they

started to see what was on the film

for the first time.

When you first

start seeing those pictures of Eric

Morcombe in one of his stereotypical

poses, you can't help but smile and

think, yes, this has to be done.

Once the scans were finished, they

had loads of data, but they also had

a new problem.

The next really

difficult part was finding a way of

digitally flattening out this warped

object and digitally prising apart

all of the individual filmmakers

within it. -- film layers. We

originally have the manual software

where I would physically go through

each individual block and spend five

or ten minutes flattening out one

layer after the other, but that was

over several thousand frames, quite

labour-intensive.

At this point

Charles took the problem to a data

scientist.

What a human would do is

try to see where the image was

within the cross-section, the

problem here is that a computer

algorithm cannot quite do that. What

the algorithm does is it follows,

predominantly, the layers of

plastic, so not the images, but the

plastic. So once we have the layer

of plastic, we can move to the edge

of that layer and read off the

image.

That process was repeated on

all of the film, making short work

of a task that would take a human

thousands of hours of work. Now

Charles is beginning the next phase,

turning the sky pictures back into

video. That is the next problem. But

now he has managed to put together a

taster of what is on that film.

And

beautifully as well. Not a word out

of sync.

I'm not mainly now. It is

me.

You realise, of course, that the

tape has stopped. How does he do it?

That is an impressive sight. That is

the king's library, assembled by

King George III in the second half

of the 18th century. Four floors

below my feet here at the British

Library lie its vast basins, which

as you can imagine also contain a

lot of books. But did you know they

also contain 6.5 million sound

recordings which are now being

digitised? -- vast basement. The

British Library is the National

Sound archive, with sound recordings

spanning the last 130 years. These

are stored on all sorts of physical

formats, from delicate wax cylinders

to brass discs, two short lived

formats like minidisks, remember

that? There is a big push to

digitise them and make them

available online. Each of the 40

different types of storage format

has unique challenges, they all need

their own playback devices, and some

need a little TLC to coax the best

quality sound from them.

Something

reasonably robust like a vinyl this,

we have an ultrasonic bath to be

able to shake that debris out of its

hiding place, we also have the more

traditional type of record cleaning

machines, the brush and vacuum

arrangements, that can produce some

quite startling results when you

start to clean off otherwise

invisible gunk.

The team also have a

workshop to keep their collection of

machines in tiptop condition, so

staff can work on as many concurrent

transfers as possible and chip away

at the millions of recordings.

If

you are faced with a tape for a disk

in a really parlous state and you

take it off a shelf, it may be

mouldy, it may need treatment, some

sort of repair, that doing that

process, that active process of

conserving and repairing that media

such that it can be replayed, even

just once, is hugely rewarding.

Certainly challenging.

But with only

2% of their collection digitise and

only 15 years until some recordings

become unsalvageable, it is a race

against time to save as many as

possible -- digitised. It reminds me

that I have a box full of minidisks

in the loft, to bring them in. That

is it for this week from the British

Library. Don't forget we live on

Facebook and on Twitter at BBC

click. Then he very much a watching.

We will see you soon. -- for

watching.