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Looks like the Sane deal is done now. Thank god, I hated playing against him. Incredible player. Sane, Gnabry and Coman as options out wide is pretty impressive depth.

Yes, after a season like that, there will definitely be some players leaving. Michorl, Schlager and Frieser almost surely, Trauner possibly too. Jürgen Werner said earlier today that they want to invest the money received from European competitions into 4-5 young players. They have already signed Mads Emil Madsen (Silkeborg IF, the most expensive signing ever for LASK) and Mamoudou Karamoko (Wolfsburg II), and are reportedly close to signing Yevgen Cheberko (Zorya Luhansk), with Lukas Grgic returning to the club too. Tetteh will go back to Red Bull, and Klauss future is unclear at this point. So it's fair to say that the squad will look quite different next season...

There are others, by far more feasible concepts to dream about

Squad value of Red Bull Salzburg: 103m, money spent on transfers in the last 5 seasons: 71m Squad value of 11 other teams in the league added together: 147m, money spent on transfers in the last 5 seasons: 30m - and 20m of that were spent by Rapid alone, meaning the rest 10 clubs spent a whopping 10m in the last 5 years... I think that says it all about the competition, really.

Faster-than-light travel: Is warp drive really possible? A NASA scientist recently released a report analysing the feasibility of warp drive as a means of faster-than-light travel. Could this Star Trek technology really be possible? ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ In the Universe of Star Trek, humanity ventures out into the Galaxy on 5 April 2063 with the first-ever journey on a ship capable of faster-than-light travel. The newly-invented ‘warp drive’ not only lets humans explore the cosmos, but attracts the attention of Vulcans and brings about our first contact with an alien species. It’s been 54 years since we were first introduced to the Enterprise, and many of Star Trek’s futuristic technologies have since been invented, from handheld communicators to universal translators. Warp drive is the next obvious choice: Voyager 1, which has travelled furthest from Earth of any spacecraft, took nearly 35 years to leave the Solar System. Not exactly handy for interstellar travel. Luckily for humanity, theoretical physicists have been working on it. In May 2020, NASA scientist Harold “Sonny” White released an internal feasibility report discussing the technology from the point of view of ‘early mission planning’. The first scientific theory of warp drive came about in 1994 when theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre used Einstein’s theory of General Relativity to develop a framework that would allow faster-than-light travel within the confines of the laws of physics. The key that makes it possible is that, technically, the ship itself doesn’t travel faster than light. “What warp drive is doing is basically saying that there is no law of physics that says space-time itself can’t go faster than the speed of light,” says Dr Erin Macdonald, astrophysicist and science consultant for Star Trek. “And so the concept of warp drive is to say, all right, let’s take our ship, let’s build a bubble of space-time around it, and then we’ll have that propel us faster than the speed of light,” she says. It’s similar to the idea of a racecar driving onboard a train: someone standing by the tracks would see the car travelling much faster than its top speed. According to General Relativity, the Universe is a flat sheet of space-time which is warped by any object with mass. “We think of the bowling ball on the trampoline and that bowling ball dips the trampoline down,” says Macdonald, “and that’s what mass does to space-time.” This distortion of space-time is what we experience as gravity. The Alcubierre drive uses the same concept. The ‘bubble’ surrounding the ship is an area of space-time that is compressed in front of the ship and expanded behind it. As with gravity, you could create this distortion using a large amount of mass. Alternatively, thanks to Einstein’s E = mc2 (energy is equal to mass, times the speed of light squared), you could equally use a huge amount of energy. Inside the bubble, space-time is completely flat, meaning the space travellers wouldn’t notice any strange, relativistic effects. The result is that the bubble of space-time is hurled across the Universe, with the travellers sitting comfortably inside their ship, speedometer still reading the same number. Unfortunately, actually creating a warp drive is even harder than it sounds. “You have to have a very, very large amount of energy,” says José Natário, Associate Professor in mathematics at the Instituto Superior Técnico in the University of Lisbon. “To have the deformation that you need for this kind of thing to work, you’d need much, much more energy than the Sun or the Galaxy,” he says. “But also, it’s negative energy.” Negative energy is not something that we can currently create – certainly not in the quantities needed to power a warp drive. How could energy be negative at all? One way to think about it is to consider a particle with negative mass. These particles would react to gravity in the exact opposite way to particles of positive mass. Instead of being pulled towards a planet or star, they would be thrown away. “If we had some sort of component like that where we had a negative mass, whatever is keeping that mass together would be that negative energy,” says Macdonald. This isn’t a problem that will go away with refining the idea, either: Natário proved mathematically that any form of warp drive will require negative energy. Joseph Agnew is a graduate student at the University of Alabama in Huntsville whose undergraduate work on warp drive was published in the AIAA journal. He thinks that more research into the fundamentals of physics is the way forward for warp drive. “Further experimental study of naturally occurring gravitational waves and perhaps a study on trying to generate artificial gravitational waves would really advance the understanding of gravity, and therefore spacetime and all the connected science,” Agnew says. Star Trek‘s USS Enterprise, the iconic warp-capable ship © Alamy Natário believes there’s an even greater problem with the concept of the Alcubierre drive. Imagine a supersonic aircraft travelling faster than the speed of sound. You don’t hear the aircraft until it has already gone past, because the sound waves can’t keep up. The warp drive experiences the same effect with light waves, meaning there is no way to send a message ahead of you. “I call it the ‘you need one to make one’ problem,” says Natário. How do you create the warped space-time geometry around your ship? First, you would need to send a signal ahead of you to ‘tell’ space-time to warp, Natário says. “To make it go faster than light, you need something that would be going faster than light, to begin with, so that you’d be able to communicate outside the horizon.” These two problems – combined with the slight issue that the travellers would be bombarded with incredibly high-energy radiation – are the downfall of warp drive, Nátario believes. “The bottom line is, in my opinion, it’s completely impossible,” he says. Agnew is more optimistic. “Many of these theoretical space transportation concepts rely extensively on a thorough understanding of gravity and spacetime, which just isn’t the case currently,” he says. “I don’t yet see any way we can say, with absolute certainty, that it will ‘never happen in a million years’. When in doubt, history dictates it’s better to err on the side of cautious, scientific optimism.” Macdonald, too, is hopeful. “I’m an eternal optimist with this because I want to join Starfleet,” she says. “The way I think about it is it’s like we never know what’s going to come down the pipe with sort of these weird, exotic, fun thought experiments. “I agree at this stage, right now, it’s a fun thought experiment. But that’s not to preclude some massive discovery that may happen that we can’t predict.” Science Focus

Cheers! Thanks , enjoy the day. Dunno how many fireworks there'll be this year

Well they are both world class players, there is little doubt in that. However, I would suggest that Sane is slightly the more rounded player. Sure they both have electric pace and they are both really influential wingers. I would even probably say that Sterling works harder for the team, he's always running everywhere and closing players down, however, I think that Sane is a much better finisher. It's not surprising why some people have felt that Sane could be a real success as a central attacker, where his scoring abilities could be better utilised. The same can't be said about Sterling, even though he has admittedly improved his finishing technique. If we are talking about both their roles as wingers, then I think that it is telling that it was only at the start of 2019, that Guardiola practically said that Sane was the best winger in the world. Now Pep has worked with both players almost on a daily basis for years now, you would think that he knows what he is talking about. I personally think that Sane has incredible potential, if he avoids injuries and if he is well settled. Sane should feel at home back in Germany playing for Bayern and he ought be well looked after, by some of the best medical staff in the world there. I believe that Sane will likely be a sensation at Bayern. With all due respect to Gnabry and Coman, who are both superb wingers in their own right, Sane promises to be an even bigger hit than they have been.

Happy Blue is my contact

A visit to Portobello Beach for wee Kaiden this afternoon with our daughter (mum).

@Michael

Hamilton will be racing in a black Mercedes. I hope he remembers that someone else had a black Mercedes...

Totally.... Here is a photo of last nights Liverpool celebrations outside Anfield.. Only about 100 people turned up apparently and were well spaced out abiding by the 2 metre rule but from the angle they have taken the photo makes it seem like there are a lot more...

He’s a professional boxer with public responsibilities and duties Josh. Obviously it was a joke but it was also a shit one that only really made light of domestic violence I don’t think people who are encouraged to knock several shades of shit out of each other should always be held to higher standards than most in society but the video was clearly in bad taste.

Happy birthday mate. Hope you had a great day.

Rapid lead 2-0 in HT

Yes, RB Salzburg kind of have a monopoly on this league. Unfortunately, money talks when the difference in the budget capabilities of clubs is so great. Unless another rich company or an oligarch takes over one of the other Austrian clubs, I think we can be fairly confident that Salzburg will continue to dominate for years to come.