CaaC (John)

FFS, me and the wife were going to do some shopping today down that street but the weather was wet & windy so we both opted out, glad we did really. Police appeal after men armed with sledgehammer and axes rob Leith jewellers in daytime raid The thieves made off with a large quantity of jewellery thought to be worth a five-figure sum Police are appealing for witnesses after three men armed with a sledgehammer and axes robbed a jewellers in Leith earlier today. The incident happened at around 11 am today (Saturday 31 August) at a jewellery store on Great Junction Street. Three men exited a black Volkswagen Golf armed with a sledgehammer and axes and forced their way into the premises before making off with a large quantity of jewellery, believed to be worth a five-figure sum. A 55-year old man who was working at the time is said to have sustained minor injuries to his arm. The three suspects and a fourth man who was driving the car ‎made off in the getaway vehicle which was later discovered abandoned in Giles Street at around midday. FULL REPORT

Real Madrid have agreed to sell Costa Rica goalkeeper Keylor Navas, 32, to Paris St-Germain, on the condition that French keeper Alphonse Areola, 26, heads in the opposite direction on loan. (Daily Star)

Former Tottenham striker Fernando Llorente, 34, now a free agent, has agreed on a two-year deal with Serie A side Napoli. (Sky Sports)

Earth's inner core is doing something weird On September 27, 1971, a nuclear bomb exploded on Russia’s Novaya Zemlya islands. The powerful blast sent waves rippling so deep inside Earth they ricocheted off the inner core, pinging an array of hundreds of mechanical ears some 4,000 miles away in the Montana wilderness. Three years later, that array picked up a signal when a second bomb exploded at nearly the same spot. This pair of nuclear explosions were part of hundreds of tests detonated during the throes of Cold War fervour. Now, the records of these wiggles are making waves among geologists: They have helped scientists calculate one of the most precise estimates yet of how fast the planet’s inner core is spinning. Surface-dwellers know that Earth spins on its axis once about every 24 hours. But the inner core is a roughly moon-sized ball of iron floating within an ocean of molten metal, which means it is free to turn independently from our planet’s large-scale spin, a phenomenon known as super-rotation. And how fast it’s going has been hotly debated. Capitalizing on the zigzagged signals from those decades-old nuclear explosions, John Vidale, a seismologist at the University of Southern California, now has the latest estimate for this rate. In a recent study published in Geophysical Research Letters, he reports that the inner core likely inches along just faster than Earth’s surface. If his rate’s right, it means that if you stood on a spot at the Equator for one year, the part of the inner core that was previously beneath you would wind up under a spot 4.8 miles away. “It’s a careful, good piece of work,” says Paul Richards, a seismologist at Columbia University who was a co-author on a 1996 study that first proposed super-rotation of the inner core. “Something is changing down there.” Better understanding the history and current dynamics of the iron blob nestled within our planet could yield more clues to the processes charging and stabilizing our magnetic field—a geologic force field that protects our world from various kinds of harmful radiation. We don’t yet fully understand how this magnetic dynamo works, but scientists strongly suspect it’s tied to the mysterious motions deep inside the planet. (Learn what really happens when Earth's magnetic field flips.) “The Earth is this extreme natural lab,” says Elizabeth Day, a deep-earth seismologist at Imperial College London who was not part of the work. Thousands of miles below our feet, pressures are crushing and temperatures are searing. “We can’t easily reproduce all of those in an actual laboratory. But if we can peer into the Earth, we get a bit of insight into this really extreme set of conditions.” The new work is just one of many attempts to figure out the core’s rate of super-rotation but offers one of the slowest rates for super-rotation yet suggested. Still, the differences between these studies is not necessarily a bad thing, Day says. “It doesn’t mean anyone is wrong,” she says. “It just means everyone is looking at slightly different things.” Core conundrum SLIDES - 1/12 Previous work, including the paper Richards coauthored, used various properties of earthquake waves travelling through the planet to deliver their estimates for the inner core’s super-rotation, with several sitting around a few tenths of a degree a year. Such measurements aren’t easy to make, though, and the resolution of many of these analyses were low. But unlike earthquakes, which send out juddering waves, nuclear explosions provide a clean signal to work with. “This is like Earth just got hit with a hammer,” Day says. The issue was extracting the data, which were encoded on nine-track tapes by the Large Aperture Seismic Array in Montana. By the 1990s, the tapes had made their way to the Albuquerque Seismological Laboratory, where Paul Earle, then a graduate student at Scripps Institute of Oceanography, was tasked with extracting the echoes of Soviet nuclear tests from the deteriorating tapes. Video: Earth 101 Earle spent two weeks in a room full of boxes laden with discs sporting cryptic labels. Many of the tapes were worn, their magnetic information lost to time. Roughly one in 10 couldn’t be read by a tape-player, says Earle, who is now a seismologist with the U.S. Geological Survey. But the effort was worth it. Earle, Vidale, and Doug Dodge of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory used the scattered waves from these nuclear explosions to peer into the planet’s core. By comparing the fingerprint of waves scattered back from explosions at nearly the same location in 1971 and 1974, the team could calculate how much faster the inner core turned relative to the rest of the planet. The process is similar to tracking a moving aeroplane using radar, Richards notes. Their initial results, published in a 2000 Nature study, pointed to a rotation rate of 0.15 degrees a year. Vidale then shifted gears and didn’t give the inner core much thought for nearly 15 years. Digging deeper That changed in December 2018, when he walked through the bustling poster hall at the American Geophysical Union’s annual conference. There, Vidale spotted the work of Jiayuan Yao, now a research fellow in geophysics at Nanyang Technological University. Yao had combed through tens of thousands of earthquakes in search of pairs that strike at different times in precisely the same location. By comparing the seismic waves that grazed the inner core from 40 of these geologic twins, he hoped to suss out the mysteries held deep in our planet. “That is really great data,” Vidale recalls thinking. However, Yao’s interpretation of the data didn’t point toward super-rotation and instead suggested something else seemed to be going on. Intrigued by this conundrum, Vidale turned back to his dataset on the nuclear explosions, but with the original analysis codes nowhere to be found, he had to start from scratch, digging even deeper into the Cold War-era ripples with an updated method. His resulting analysis still yielded super-rotation, but it was both slower and more precise than previous estimates, pointing instead toward the newly described rate of 0.07 degree a year between 1971 and 1974. Certain uncertainty But while other scientists praise the thoroughness of Vidale’s latest work, the debate seems far from settled. Yao and his colleagues recently published an intriguing alternative explanation using his data from twin earthquakes. Perhaps, they posit, the inner core is actually rotating at the same speed as the rest of our planet, and the apparent difference could instead be explained by the inner core having a jagged surface that shifts over time, with mountains rising or canyons cutting into the iron orb. (Read about ‘mountains’ taller than Everest that lurk deep inside Earth.) Vidale finds that analysis intriguing, but while he agrees that there may be more than super-rotation in the mix, he’s sceptical of Yao’s precise explanation. One possibility, Richards argues, is that blob itself is warping over time. “It’s like when you throw a pizza up in the air,” he says. “It’s spinning, but it’s flopping around. It’s deforming as it rotates.” It’s also possible that the rate of inner core rotation varies over time, adds Xiaodong Song, a deep-earth seismologist at the University of Illinois who co-authored the 1996 study first documenting inner core rotation. While Vidale’s latest rate is robust, it’s limited to a single time period, so further confirmation is necessary, he says via email. “It’s so hard to do these studies,” says Jessica Irving, a deep-earth seismologist at Princeton University. “Every scrap of data becomes valuable, and unfortunately there just aren’t very many scraps of data.” Perhaps more definitive answers may be on the horizon. Analyses are getting better, and data are accruing on seismometers around the world that are constantly listening for our planet’s every tremble. Solving the puzzle of the inner core, Yao says, “doesn’t need to take another decade.” https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/spotlight/earths-inner-core-is-doing-something-weird/ar-AAG2cmq?ocid=chromentp

Arctic shipwreck frozen in time astounds archaeologists To investigate the lower decks of the H.M.S. Terror, a Parks Canada archaeologist inserts a miniature underwater drone through a skylight. The wreck of H.M.S. Terror, one of the long lost ships from Sir John Franklin’s 1845 expedition to find the Northwest Passage, is astonishingly well preserved, say Parks Canada archaeologists, who recently used underwater drones to peer deep inside the historic vessel’s interior. “The ship is amazingly intact,” says Ryan Harris, the lead archaeologist on the project. “You look at it and find it hard to believe this is a 170-year-old shipwreck. You just don’t see this kind of thing very often.” Discovered in 2016 in icy waters off King William Island in Canada’s far north, the shipwreck hadn’t been thoroughly studied until now. Taking advantage of unusually calm seas and good underwater visibility, a team from Parks Canada, in partnership with Inuit, earlier this month made a series of seven dives on the fabled wreck. Working swiftly in the frigid water, divers inserted miniature, remotely-operated drones through openings in the main hatchway and skylights in the crew’s cabins, officers’ mess, and captain’s stateroom. “We were able to explore 20 cabins and compartments, going from room to room,” says Harris. “The doors were all eerily wide open.” What they saw astonished and delighted them: dinner plates and glasses still on shelves, beds and desks in order, scientific instruments in their cases—and hints that journals, charts, and perhaps even early photographs may be preserved under drifts of sediment that cover much of the interior. “Those blankets of sediment, together with the cold water and darkness, create a near-perfect anaerobic environment that’s ideal for preserving delicate organics such as textiles or paper,” says Harris. “There is a very high probability of finding clothing or documents, some of them possibly even still legible. Rolled or folded charts in the captain’s map cupboard, for example, could well have survived.” The only area below decks the team was unable to access was the captain’s sleeping quarters. Apparently the last person to leave closed the door. “Intriguingly, it was the only closed door on the ship,” says Harris. “I’d love to know what’s in there.” Just as tantalising is the possibility that there could be pictures of the expedition awaiting discovery. It’s known that the expedition had a daguerreotype apparatus, and assuming it was used, the glass plates could still be aboard. “And if there are, it’s also possible to develop them,” says Harris. “It’s been done with finds at other shipwrecks. The techniques are there.” A great mystery The fate of the Franklin expedition has been one of history’s great mysteries. What’s known is that Sir John Franklin set sail in May 1845 with a crew of 133 men and orders to discover the Northwest Passage—a goal that had eluded explorers for centuries. Then as now, geopolitics was a driving force in Arctic exploration, with the Royal Navy wanting to secure the fabled shortcut to the Pacific ahead of the Russians, who had maritime aspirations of their own. With this in mind, no expense was spared. Franklin was given command of two state-of-the-art ships, Erebus and Terror, both equipped with stout, iron-sheathed hulls and steam engines, as well as the finest scientific equipment and enough food and supplies for three years in the high Arctic. It was one of the best equipped and best-prepared expeditions ever to leave Britain’s shores. After brief stops in Scotland’s Orkney Islands and Greenland, the two ships set off for Arctic Canada in hopes of picking their way through its labyrinth of straits and bays and islands and eventually reaching the Pacific Ocean. The last European eyes to see the ships were the crews of two whaling vessels who encountered Erebus and Terror in late July 1845, on the crossing from Greenland to Canada’s remote Baffin Island. After that, they were never seen or heard from again. As years passed with no word of the expedition, search parties were sent out. Over time the discovery of skeletons and discarded equipment—as well as disturbing evidence of cannibalism—made clear that the expedition had met with disaster. But how and why has remained a mystery. A brief note found under a cairn gives a bit of the story. Dated April 1848 and signed by Francis Crozier—captain of the Terror, who by then had taken command of the expedition—it stated that the ships had been locked in ice for a year and a half, that 24 of the men were already dead—including Franklin—and that Crozier and the other survivors planned to attempt to walk overland to a remote fur-trading outpost hundreds of miles away on the Canadian mainland. None of them ever arrived. What caused such a well-equipped expedition to go so badly wrong remains a mystery. But in recent years the two biggest pieces of the puzzle—the ships themselves—were discovered: Erebus in 2014, lying in 36 feet of water off King William Island, and Terror two years later, found in a bay about 45 miles away, in 80 feet of water and largely intact. Why the ships ended up so far apart, which one went down first, and why and how the ships sank are questions archaeologists hope to answer. “There’s no obvious reason for Terror to have sunk,” says Ryan. “It wasn’t crushed by ice, and there’s no breach in the hull. Yet it appears to have sunk swiftly and suddenly and settled gently to the bottom. What happened?” Teasing out the answers won’t be easy, even with such a bounty of artefacts. There are plans to excavate both wrecks, but it will be a slow process requiring years. “Diving up here is extremely difficult,” says Ryan. “The water is extremely cold, making it impossible to stay down for very long, and the diving season is short—a few weeks if you’re lucky, a few days if you’re not.” Even so, this season’s work on Terror has already provided some tantalising clues that will help researchers develop a chronology of the disaster. “We noticed the ship’s propeller still in place,” says Ryan. “We know that it had a mechanism to lift it out of the water during winter so that it wouldn’t be damaged by the ice. So, the fact that it’s deployed suggests it was probably spring or summer when the ship sank. So, too, does the fact that none of the skylights were boarded up, as they would have been to protect them against the winter snows.” No doubt there are a lot more answers lying beneath the sediment in those cabins, says Ryan. “One way or another, I feel confident we’ll get to the bottom of the story.” https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/offbeat/arctic-shipwreck-frozen-in-time-astounds-archaeologists/ar-AAGuAT0

Ryotaro Meshino: Hearts sign Manchester City midfielder on loan Ryotaro Meshino says he turned down other European clubs to join Hearts on loan from Manchester City. The 21-year-old playmaker signed for City from Gamba Osaka on the Premier League's August deadline day. Subject to international clearance, Meshino could be involved in Saturday's Premiership game against Hamilton Academical at Tynecastle. "I visited many clubs in Europe and I felt that at Hearts, it was the best feeling," he told Hearts TV. "The people at the club really wanted me to come here and this was the most important thing when I visited. FULL REPORT

Kevin Mirallas leaves Everton to join Royal Antwerp Belgium winger Kevin Mirallas has joined Royal Antwerp in his home country after seven years at Everton. The 31-year-old made 186 appearances and scored 38 goals after signing from Olympiakos in 2012. He returned on loan at the Greek club for six months in 2018 and spent last season at Serie A side Fiorentina. On Friday, Everton boss Marco Silva said players like Mirallas who are on the fringes of the first-team squad need to "find a solution". Speaking about the Belgian and Congolese winger Yannick Bolasie, Silva added: "It is important for them to play as much as they can because if they stay here not playing football it is not the best thing for them." https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/49529590

Newcastle's Matt Ritchie faces two months out with ankle injury Newcastle's Matt Ritchie could be out for two months with the ankle injury he suffered in Wednesday's Carabao Cup second-round defeat by Leicester. The Scotland midfielder, 29, suffered ligament in what manager Steve Bruce described as a "horror challenge" by Hamza Choudhury. "There is ankle ligament damage, bone bruising, cuts," said Bruce. "Thankfully it's not six months, but it's bad enough when it's the best part of eight weeks." After the game at St James' Park, which Leicester won on penalties following a 1-1 draw, Bruce said: "These tackles are the ones that damage you. "Let's hope the young lad learns from it because he's a good player, the kid. But obviously it doesn't help us and Matt in particular." In June, 21-year-old Choudhury apologised for an "over-aggressive" tackle on Jonathan Bamba during England's European Under-21 Championship defeat by France. Choudhury was sent off and Bamba went to the hospital for X-rays. Ritchie, usually a winger, has operated at left wing-back this season, starting Newcastle's three Premier League games. Jetro Willems, a possible replacement, is doubtful for Saturday's home game against Watford. Paul Dummett is another option for Bruce, who claimed his first win since taking charge at Tottenham last weekend. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/49523349

DNA to solve the mystery of Napoleon's general lost in Russia © Denis Maximov Genetic analysis is being carried out to confirm the identity, using DNA from one of the general's descendants Archaeologists are set to unveil the answer to a 200-year-old question over the remains of a French general who died during Napoleon's 1812 campaign in Russia. Charles Etienne Gudin was hit by a cannonball in the Battle of Valutino on August 19 near Smolensk, a city west of Moscow close to the border with Bela © Denis Maximov The Franco-Russian search team checked a theory by a witness of the general's funeral and found pieces of a wooden casket buried under an old dance floor in the city park His leg was amputated and he died three days later from gangrene, aged 44. Related Slideshow: Historical events that nobody can explain (Provided by StarInsider) SLIDES - 1/31 The French army cut out his heart, now buried at the Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris, but the site of the rest of his remains was never known until researchers found a likely skeleton this summer. "As soon as I saw the skeleton with just one leg, I knew that we had our man," the head of the Franco-Russian team that discovered the remains in July, Marina Nesterova, told AFP. Genetic analysis is being carried out to confirm the identity, using DNA from one of the general's descendants, with the results to be announced on Thursday. Gudin is said to have been one of Napoleon's favourite generals and the two men attended military school together. His name is engraved on the Arc de Triomphe monument in Paris. The fresh search for his remains has been underway since May, funded by a Franco-Russian group headed by Pierre Malinowski, a historian and former soldier with ties to the French far-right and support from the Kremlin. The team in Smolensk first followed the memoirs of a subordinate of Gudin, Marshall Davout, who organised the funeral and described a mausoleum made of four cannon barrels pointing upward, said Nikolai Makarov, the director of the Russian Institute of Archaeology. © Denis MAXIMOV Charles Etienne Gudin is said to have been one of Napoleon's favourite generals and the two men attended military school together When that trail ran cold, they checked another theory by a witness of the funeral and found pieces of a wooden casket buried under an old dance floor in the city park. A preliminary report concluded that the skeleton belonged to a man who died aged 40-45. Gudin's death near Smolensk came near the beginning of Napoleon's march toward Moscow, 400 kilometres (250 miles) further east. Napoleon had hoped to defeat the Russian army at Valutino and sign an advantageous treaty, but it managed to escape and Russian Tsar Alexander refused to discuss peace. "This battle could have been decisive if Napoleon hadn't underestimated the Russians," Malinowski said. "Heavy losses in this battle showed Napoleon that he was going to go through hell in Russia." Napoleon's march on Russia ended in a disastrous retreat as Russians used scorched earth tactics and even ordered Moscow to be burnt to sap Napoleon's resources. Less than 10 per cent of his Grand Armee survived Russian invasion https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/offbeat/dna-to-solve-mystery-of-napoleons-general-lost-in-russia/ar-AAGs7k2

Celtic want to sign Birmingham's 18-year-old defender Mitch Roberts, who has previously attracted interest from Manchester City. (Birmingham Live)

@Stan, he must be playing for your Leicester again England squad: Defenders: Trent Alexander-Arnold (Liverpool), Ben Chilwell (Leicester), Joe Gomez (Liverpool), Michael Keane (Everton), Harry Maguire (Leicester), Tyrone Mings (Aston Villa), Danny Rose (Tottenham), Kieran Trippier (Atletico Madrid), Aaron Wan-Bissaka (Manchester United) https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/49507247

45 Historical Sites That No Longer Exist SLIDES - 1/46

Skull of humankind's oldest-known ancestor discovered VIDEO The face of the oldest species that unambiguously sits on the human evolutionary tree has been revealed for the first time by the discovery of a 3.8 million-year-old skull in Ethiopia. The fossil belongs to an ancient hominin, Australopithecus anamensis, believed to be the direct ancestor of the famous “Lucy” species, Australopithecus afarensis. It dates back to a time when our ancestors were emerging from the trees to walk on two legs, but still had distinctly ape-like protruding faces, powerful jaws and small brains, and is the oldest-known member of the Australopithecus group. While Lucy became celebrated in studies of human evolution, her direct predecessor has remained a shadowy trace on the record, with only a handful of teeth, some limb bones and a few fragments of the skull to provide clues about appearance and lifestyle. The latest specimen, a remarkably complete adult male skull casually named MRD, changes this. “It is good to finally be able to put a face to the name,” said Stephanie Melillo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, based in Germany, who is the co-author of an analysis of the find. Prof Fred Spoor of the Natural History Museum, London, who was not involved in the research, said the discovery of MRD – and its dating to a period when the fossil record is very sparse – would substantially affect thinking on the evolutionary family tree of early hominins. “This cranium looks set to become another celebrated icon of human evolution,” he said. The skull shows that MRD had a small brain – about a quarter of the size of a modern human – but was already losing some of its ape-like features. Its canines are smaller than those seen in even earlier fossils and it is already developing the powerful jaw and prominent cheekbones seen in Lucy and the famous Mrs Ples fossil (another later member of the Australopithecus group), which scientists think helped them chew tough food during dry seasons when less vegetation was available. The dating of the skull also reveals that Anamensis and its descendent species, Lucy, coexisted for a period of at least 100,000 years. This discovery challenges the long-held notion of linear evolution, in which one species disappears and is replaced by a new one. Anamensis, which now spans from 4.2 million to 3.8 million years ago, is still thought to be Lucy’s ancestor but continued to hang around after the Lucy group branched off from the parent lineage. Geological evidence suggests the landscape would have featured extremely steep hills, volcanoes, lava flows and rifts that could easily have isolated populations, allowing them to diverge. Divergent groups may have later crossed paths and competed for food and territory. Yohannes Haile-Selassie, of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History and Case Western Reserve University, who led the research, said: “This is a game-changer in our understanding of human evolution during the Pliocene Afarensis, which continued to appear on the fossil record until at least 3 million years ago, has often been put forward as a likely candidate ultimately giving rise to the Homo lineage to which modern humans belong. But the discovery that multiple different lineages coexisted makes this hypothesis much less certain, according to the researchers. “Having multiple candidates ancestral species in the right time and place makes it more challenging to determine which gave rise to Homo,” said Melillo. Spoor described Anamensis as the “oldest-known species that is unambiguously part of the human evolutionary tree”. Older fossils, like Ardi, which dates to 4.4 million years, are more contentious – some say it is on the human lineage, while others regard it as an extinct form of ape. The first piece of the new fossil, the upper jaw, was found by a local worker in February 2016, in the Afar region of Ethiopia. “I couldn’t believe my eyes when I spotted the rest of the cranium. It was a eureka moment and a dream come true,” said Haile-Selassie. Fossil pollen grains and chemical remains of fossil plant and algae taken from the sediment suggest that the individual lived by a river or along the shores of a lake surrounded by trees and shrubland. The findings are published in the journal Nature. https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/techandscience/skull-of-humankinds-oldest-known-ancestor-discovered/ar-AAGt1VO?li=BBoPWjQ

James Webb Space Telescope comes together The successor to the Hubble observatory has reached a key milestone in its construction. All the elements that make up the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have been brought together for the first time. It sets the stage for some critical tests that will hopefully lead to a launch to orbit sometime in 2021. JWST will use a colossal mirror and state-of-the-art instruments to try to see the glow from the very first stars to shine in the Universe. It will also have the power to resolve the atmospheres of many of the new planets now being discovered beyond our Solar System and to analyse their atmospheres for the potential for life. The telescope is a joint endeavour of the American (Nasa), European (Esa) and Canadian (CSA) space agencies. Hubble's $10bn successor delayed again Could Nasa's next big thing detect alien life? Scientists detect the legacy of first stars It can be thought of as having three main parts - a telescope (mirrors and instruments); a big sun shield to shade its sensitive view of the sky; and a spacecraft unit that will manage the observatory's day-to-day operations in orbit. These three segments have finally been bolted together at a Los Angeles factory facility belonging to the prime contractor, Northrop Grumman. All the components that have gone into making JWST have been repeatedly tested - at both the individual and the integrated level. That cycle of testing continues now that the three major segments are connected. A vital test will be a demonstration that Webb can fully deploy its sunshield. This tennis court-sized parasol is made up of five extremely thin layers of Kapton insulating film. Its job is to put the mirrors and four instruments completely in the shade when observing the cosmos. Stray light from our Sun would otherwise warm surfaces and swamp the faint infrared radiation coming from distant galaxies. But to be effective, the shield must roll out properly without kinks and without tears. "This is an exciting time to now see all Webb's parts finally joined together into a single observatory for the very first time," said Gregory Robinson, the Webb programme director at Nasa HQ in Washington, DC. "The engineering team has accomplished a huge step forward and soon we will be able to see incredible new views of our amazing Universe." Anyone who has followed the story of JWST knows it is running late - very late, by more than a decade. The project has also gone massively over-budget. The cost after build, launch and five years of operations is estimated to be about $10bn. But this is a venture that astronomers fully expect to be a revelation. The current Hubble telescope, for example, is restricted in how deeply it can see into space - and therefore how far back in time it can see. Its 2.4m-wide mirror cannot quite collect enough photons, and its instruments are not sensitive in just the right portion of the electromagnetic spectrum to be able to probe the era of the first-star formation - more than 13.5 billion years ago. JWST, in contrast, has a 6.5m-wide mirror - seven times the light-collecting area of Hubble - and its instruments will be perfectly tuned in the infrared to pick up the light from these founding stars. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-49504866

I got to see our daughters adopted pet rat named badger, as the daughter said they call these type of pet rats Dumbo Rats because of their ears, the rat was very friendly and she snuggled into my cheek and gave my beard a wee tug.

The worse thing that I did that made me sick as a dog was when I was working in the Country Roads Board in Victoria, Australia right in the bush area tarring roads, it was summertime and around 40c in the shade and I was what you call a lead flagman, I had a yellow coat on, skid lid (safety helmet) and a walkie talkie and a big sign that I would have to put up to stop traffic if they had started to tar a certain part of the road, you could say I looked like a School Lollypop Man nowadays. Stood there sweating my bollocks off and I had stopped the traffic, well...I opened my mouth and yawned and a great big Australian bush fly went straight in my gob and I swallowed it, I could feel it wriggling all the way down, I went up to this fair-dinkum Aussie and said "I have just swallowed a bush fly!!" all he said with a smile and replied "Don't worry cobber, the wings and legs will stay in your guts and you will crap the rest out". Another insect that was bad out in Australia in the bush is Bull Ants, big bastards they were and they will attack you if you disturb their nests, once I headed in the bush and dug a hole to have a crap, dropped my pants and sat down, I got up quick smart and run yelling brushing my arse with my hands, pants around my ankles... I had dug and sat on a Bull Ants nest and they were biting my arse like a beauty.

We call them midgies, they don't bother me but the wife goes potty when she is having a wine and we have the window open because its hot and someone is cutting their lawn and a few get in the window and keep buzzing around her glass, she ends up getting a bit of kitchen roll and lays it on top of her glass on the table. I can't stand mosquitos and flies after growing up in Aussie land, they were everywhere in the summertime and they did my head in especially when we bought a house right in the bush, we had mesh nets on all the window and a mesh front door but the wee bastards still found a way in.

Napoli are holding off offering a two-year contract to 34-year-old free agent Fernando Llorente as they await an outcome from 26-year-old Mauro Icardi's summit talks with Inter Milan. (Corriere dello Sport via Football Italia) Inter Milan forward Romelu Lukaku, 26, wanted to leave Manchester United because he was bored at Old Trafford, according to Belgium boss Roberto Martinez. (Mirror)

I can't say much about the bum fluff @Teso dos Bichos but I do like the United top.

'Rosalind Franklin' Mars rover assembly completed Assembly of the rover Europe and Russia plan to send to the Red Planet next year is complete. Engineers at Airbus in Stevenage, UK, will display the finished vehicle on Tuesday ahead of its shipment to France for testing. Called "Rosalind Franklin" after the British DNA pioneer, the six-wheeled robot will search for life on Mars. It has a drill to burrow 2m below ground to try to detect the presence of microbes, either living or fossilised. The project is a joint endeavour of the European and Russian space agencies, with input from the Americans. Mars mission test failure threat to launch date Can this box answer the biggest question on Mars? What chance of finding life on Mars? Although the rover's build took just nine months, development work at component and instrument level has consumed more than a decade. Lift-off atop a Proton rocket is scheduled for July 2020. It is an eight-month cruise to Mars, with the landing on an ancient equatorial plain targeted for 18 March 2021. China and the US are preparing their own rovers for launch in the same departure window as Rosalind Franklin. China's vehicle, dubbed XH-1, is a slightly smaller concept. The Americans are assembling a near-copy of the one-tonne Curiosity robot that has been investigating the planet for the past seven years. Their machine is codenamed currently simply Mars 2020. What still needs to be done? The roughly 300kg Rosalind Franklin rover is being bagged and boxed, ready to be sent to an Airbus facility in Toulouse where a testing regime will ensure it can withstand the rigours of interplanetary travel. There are actually three outstanding items yet to be integrated on the robot. These are the radioisotope heaters that will keep the vehicle warm in the bitter conditions on Mars. But they are a Russian expertise and will not be inserted until just prior to blast-off. In parallel with the work on the rover, engineers in Italy at the Thales Alenia Space (TAS) company are preparing the mechanisms required to get the rover safely to, and on to, Mars. In Turin on Tuesday, the cruise spacecraft that will shepherd the robot to the Red Planet, and the descent module, which will protect it as it enters Mars' atmosphere, will have their first fit-check. Eventually, all elements of the mission will meet in Cannes, at another TAS factory, for end-to-end mating. Assuming no problems are found, everything will then be despatched to Baikonur to be placed on top of the Proton. Rosalind Franklin was "superb scientific tool", said Dr David Parker, Esa's director of human and robotic exploration. "We still have big challenges ahead but mission success is our number one priority." Why is this important for the UK? Tuesday's send-off in front of the media is a big moment for the UK, which has made the Mars robot a central feature of its space science policy. Britain has invested in the order of €290m (£260m) in the wider mission, codenamed ExoMars, that also includes a satellite positioned in orbit around the Red Planet. A further £14m (€16m) was set aside specifically for instrumentation contributions on both the rover and the satellite. UK scientists lead the PanCam (the panoramic camera system on the rover), which will take the pictures that help the robot navigate Mars' terrain and identify the rocks of greatest interest. The rover's name: Who was Rosalind Franklin? In 1952, Rosalind Franklin was at King's College London (KCL) investigating the atomic arrangement of DNA, using her skills as an X-ray crystallographer to create images for analysis. One of her team's pictures, known as Photo 51, provided the essential insights for Crick and Watson to build the first three-dimensional model of the two-stranded macromolecule. It was one of the supreme achievements of 20th-Century science, enabling researchers to finally understand how DNA stored, copied and transmitted the genetic "code of life". Crick, Watson, and KCL colleague Maurice Wilkins received the 1962 Nobel Prize for the breakthrough. Franklin's untimely death meant she could not be considered for the award (Nobels are not awarded posthumously). However, many argue that her contribution has never really been given the attention it deserves and has even been underplayed. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-49469225

Ex-Manchester United forward Eric Cantona wins Uefa President's Award Eric Cantona scored 64 goals in 143 appearances for Manchester United Former Manchester United forward Eric Cantona will be awarded the Uefa President's Award for his commitment to helping improve the lives of others. The 53-year-old, who won 45 caps for France, will be presented with the award in Monaco on Thursday. Uefa president Aleksander Ceferin was impressed by his work since retiring. "This award not only recognises his career as a player of the highest calibre but also honours him for the person he is," said Ceferin. "[He is] a man who refuses compromise, who stands up for his values, who speaks his mind and, in particular, puts his heart and his soul into supporting the causes he believes in." Cantona won the old First Division title with Leeds United in 1992 before joining Manchester United, where he won four Premier Leagues and two FA Cups. He retired aged 30 in 1997 and, after turning his hand to beach soccer and acting, has been committed to helping charitable causes. Previous winners of the award - which "recognises outstanding achievements, professional excellence and exemplary personal qualities" - include David Beckham, Johan Cruyff, Bobby Charlton, Franz Beckenbauer, Bobby Robson and Paolo Maldini. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/49480197

If you think you've had bad luck when gambling before, brace yourself for a cautionary tale. Jack Baines is a 22-year-old from Scunthorpe. He's a Manchester United fan and - like most of us - likes to chuck a couple of quid on the weekend's fixtures. This weekend, Jack decided to stick the princely sum of one pound on an unlikely seven-team accumulator. 'Unlikely' in this case means that the returns from £1 would have been exactly £98,513.41. Long odds, for sure.