CaaC - John

I would scrap it but it's been around since UEFA introduced it in the 1965/66 season I do believe so I don't think they would change it, I would rather go into extra time and a golden goal rule implicated and no offside.

Aye, I went and ticked too, I fell for it

For some reason, my quote box is not working properly, I will cut and paste an article or photo in the frame of the quote box but when I post a huge gap will appear at the top and the article right at the bottom, I don't know if anyone else is having this problem? I will try a quote in here and see if it works... Edit Seems to be working ok now but will have to try a longer quote whenever and see if it has corrected itself.

(Quote Box, not functioning properly) A Massive asteroid will pass closer to Earth than the Moon, Nasa warns Anthony Cuthbertson An asteroid purportedly the size of a 10-storey building will pass by the Earth at half the distance to the Moon, Nasa has warned. Asteroid 2019 GC6 will pass within roughly 136,000 miles of Earth on Thursday, safely avoiding a devastating collision. Nasa warned the orbital trajectory of the asteroid means it may still pose a risk in the future, with estimations suggesting it could be anywhere between 7.5 metres and 30 metres in length. Shortly after it was discovered on 9 April by astronomers at the Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona, scientists at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California placed it on a list of asteroids that risk colliding with Earth in the next 100 years. It is difficult to accurately predict its exact path but it is set to pass close to the Earth again in 2034, 2041 and 2048. It is not uncommon for rogue space debris to collide with Earth, with tons of cosmic material passing through the atmosphere every day. The vast majority burns up before it reaches the ground, but every decade or so a larger asteroid collides with Earth. In 2013, an asteroid 20m in diameter entered the Earth’s atmosphere over the city of Chelyabinsk in Russia, causing a massive explosion. A subsequent study calculated it released more than 30 times the explosive energy of the Hiroshima bomb, contributing to more than 1,500 people in the local area seeking medical treatment. “If humanity does not want to go the way of the dinosaurs, we need to study an event like this in detail,” Professor Qing-Zhu Yin of the University of California said at the time. “Chelyabinsk serves as a unique calibration point for high-energy meteorite impact events for our future studies.” But due to their relatively tiny size, asteroids are notoriously difficult to spot and often go undetected until a few days before they are due to pass or collide with Earth. © Provided by Independent Digital News & Media Limited The impact site of the main mass of the Chelyabinsk meteorite in the ice of Lake Chebarkul (PA) Astronomers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory recently described it as like spotting a lump of coal in the night’s sky. “Near-Earth objects [NEOs] are intrinsically faint because they are mostly really small and far away from us in space. Add to this the fact that some of them are as dark as printer toner, and trying to spot them against the black of space is very hard,” said Amy Mainzer, principal investigator of Nasa’s asteroid-hunting mission at the lab. “If we find an object only a few days from impact, it greatly limits our choices, so in our search efforts we’ve focussed on finding NEOs when they are further away from Earth, providing a maximum amount of time and opening up a wider range of mitigation possibilities.” https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/techandscience/massive-asteroid-will-pass-closer-to-earth-than-the-moon-nasa-warns/ar-BBW2aAC?ocid=chromentp

I loved this photo. I walked through the gutted cathedral… then the crucifix shone from what remained of the altar, a symbol of defiance in the gloom: ROBERT HARDMAN is among first witnesses inside ravaged Notre Dame Robert Hardman for the Daily Mail

Knowing them great sparks they will have a brainstorm and reinstate Gordan Strachan back as Scottish manager And then again they may try someone that is not Scottish?

@Stan or any other Admin/Mod my edit facility for the post above does not seem to be working to reduce the quote to the correct size, please help, pretty please xxxx

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/47767790

This new species of ancient carnivore was bigger than a polar bear Catherine Zuckerman The handful of mysterious fossils sat unstudied for decades, tucked safely in a drawer at the Nairobi National Museum in Kenya. But now, analysis of the ancient remains has revealed that they belonged to a giant meat-eating mammal larger than a polar bear, a newly described species that’s been dubbed Simbakubwa kutokaafrika. Reported this week in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, the powerful predator prowled the Earth some 22 million years ago. Although Simbakubwa translates to “big lion” in Swahili, this behemoth was not a big cat. Instead, it is the oldest known member in a group of extinct mammals called hyaenodonts, so named due to their dental resemblance to hyenas, even though the groups are also unrelated. The discovery helps connect some of the evolutionary dots for this group of massive meat-eaters, which were near the top of the food chain in the same African ecosystems where early apes and monkeys were also evolving. The fossil may also help scientists better understand why these apex predators ultimately did not survive. The find “is a good chance for us to bring these other lesser known carnivorous predators to the surface,” says Jack Tseng, an evolutionary biologist and vertebrate paleontologist at the University at Buffalo who was not involved in the study. “Before the predecessors of modern carnivorans that we’re so familiar with—lions, hyenas, wolves—before they ever evolved, the global scene of predators was essentially dominated by these hyaenodonts." In 2013, paleontologist Matthew Borths was doing research at the Nairobi museum for his dissertation on the hyaenodonts, and he asked a curator if he could look at their specimens. There, he found the unusual fossils in a cabinet that was part of a collection marked “hyenas.” The fossils had been excavated between 1978 and 1980 at a site in western Kenya called Meswa Bridge. So Borths reached out to University of Ohio paleontologist and National Geographic grantee Nancy Stevens, who had discovered an important fossil site in Tanzania that’s only a couple of million years older. Their fate was sealed when Stevens told Borths that she had opened the exact same drawer while working in Nairobi and had wondered about its contents. “It was like the two of us could commiserate, like, Isn’t this amazing, we should do something!” Borths says. Stevens later asked Borths to join her lab as a postdoctoral researcher, and together the two returned to the Nairobi National Museum in 2017 to begin analyzing and describing the specimens, which included most of the animal’s jaw as well as bits of skeleton, skull, and teeth. Carnivores are often noted for their front canine teeth, which help grab prey, but their back teeth are important, too. “It’s in the back of the head that this business of slicing through meat takes place,” Borths says. All modern carnivores—including cats, dogs, racoons, wolves, and bears—have one pair of these meat-slicing teeth. Hyaenodonts had three pairs. “This animal had lots of blades,” Borth says. Aside from their fear factor, the teeth were key to helping the duo grasp the full picture of an extinct species. Without good teeth to study, Borths says, “it’s like having pieces from different sides of the puzzle, and nothing to connect the pieces in between.” Simbakubwa “brings together tooth information, a little bit of skull information, and a little bit of skeletal information to help unite a lot of this material that’s been floating around. It really helps contextualize this whole group of giant meat-eaters,” he says. “The science is definitely very impressive,” Tseng adds. “Any time you have a new record of something this large in the fauna and ecological food web, it makes you reconsider exactly what the interactions were like between predator and prey.” Adapt or die One of the goals of the research, which was partially funded by the National Geographic Society, was to put Simbakubwa in its family tree, Borths says. “Once you figure out the relationships between these animals, you can start to do things like estimate how big do you think the common ancestor of these creatures was, what was the world like when that theoretical common ancestor might have been alive?” he says. “You can experiment with the data a little bit to figure out how these big evolutionary changes map onto other changes, like climate change and continental drift.” As Africa got closer to Eurasia 20 million years ago, animals began to mix across continents, creating an ecological exchange that “raises all kinds of hell,” Borths says. And as the continents shifted and the East African rift began to rise up, ocean currents shifted, too. “All of those pieces are really fascinating natural experiments in how different groups adapt,” Borths says. Despite being large and in charge, Simbakubwa did not make it and even its relatives were extinct by the end of the Miocene epoch, roughly five million years ago. But why? The animal “was not built for failure,” Borths says, and it survived for a long time after hyaenodonts evolved in Africa and spread to Asia and Europe. But as a hypercarnivore, which by definition is an animal that gets more than 70 per cent of its calories from meat, it seems the predator was likely a casualty of rapid environmental change. Modern hypercarnivores, such as lions, hyenas, tigers, and wolves, “are among the most endangered mammals we have, and part of the reason for that is they’re so sensitive to environmental disruption,” Borths says. Because hypercarnivore populations are relatively small compared to other organisms, they suffer most when the food chain begins to destabilize. “Something put [Simbakubwa] over the edge,” Borths says. “Things changed too quickly, the prey species population didn’t come back fast enough, and these things ultimately went extinct.” https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/this-new-species-of-ancient-carnivore-was-bigger-than-a-polar-bear/ar-BBW3Fzw?ocid=chromentp

The guy from the bird sanctuary back again in the square here in Leith, Edinburgh, donations are welcome so me and the wife normally throw a couple of quid in the bucket provided, he has some beautiful birds on show and the first photo I call 'Old Faithful' an owl he always brings and has been for the last 2 years or so.

Only saw the second half but watched highlights of the whole match and that game beats anything I have seen for a long, long while, congratulations to both teams and especially Spurs, poor old Pep, he just cannot win the Champions League with any other team than Barca, maybe he might move on again and try somewhere else, Barca>Bayern>City>?

Football was a man's game in my time buddy, you just have to touch a player nowadays with your little finger and they go down like a ton of bricks rolling around as if they had been hit by an express train, the old days players would be hacked down by the hard men then like Norman 'Bite Your Legs' Hunter, Dave Mackay, Tommy Smith etc and they would just get up, dust themselves down and got on with it and give back just as much as they got, no wet weather footballs then or stadiums that could close their roofs because of the weather......now I DO feel old

I am 69 years old and was 24 in Australia when I was mesmerized in Australia watching them on tv play with my old man.