CaaC (John)

Someone has just posted this on Facebook, I was going to post it in the Music thread but... The asshole song

Jesus, not another one, not as bad as Greenfell so I have read thank fuck, I wonder if the cladding is involved again? Barking fire: Blaze breaks out in east London flats Dozens of firefighters are dealing with a large fire at a block of flats in Barking, east London. London Fire Brigade tweeted that 15 crews totalling about 100 firefighters were called to De Pass Gardens at 15:31 BST. The Met Police said officers were helping firefighters deal with "a major incident". Pictures on social media showed part of the building engulfed in flames and smoke billowing into the air. About 100 firefighters were called to De Pass Gardens in Barking The ground floor to the sixth floor of the block of flats was alight, according to the London Fire Brigade. Crews from Barking, Dagenham East Ham and other surrounding fire stations are at the scene. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-48574044

Aye, our son is a Hearts of Midlothian and a Liverpool fan, I am a Rangers and a Man United fan, there is a Man United supporters club in Edinburgh and a Liverpool Supporters club and a lot more with English club connections. Liverpool Man United

I see Liverpool are playing Napoli here at Murrayfield on the 28th July and that's our son trying to get tickets for him and his son (our grandson), he asked me if I would like to go with them and all I said is I will think about it lol. Liverpool v Napoli

Not much of a tennis fan but for anybody to beat Novak Djokovic needs a round of applause. __________________________________________________________________________________ Dominic Thiem produced a stunning upset over Novak Djokovic in the French Open semi-finals to end the world number one's hopes of holding all four grand slam titles. https://www.msn.com/en-gb/sport/tennis/dominic-thiem-edges-novak-djokovic-in-epic-to-reach-french-open-2019-final-against-rafael-nadal/ar-AACAcTE?ocid=chromentp

Sad to hear, RIP Justin. Justin Edinburgh dies aged 49: Leyton Orient boss and former Tottenham defender passes away Leyton Orient manager Justin Edinburgh has died at the age of 49. The former Tottenham, Portsmouth and Southend player was taken to hospital on Monday after a cardiac arrest. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/48568007

A man leaves rucksack full of drugs on a tram - along with his name and address Police have poked fun at a man who left a rucksack full of drugs on a tram - along with his name and address. Greater Manchester Police shared the error on Facebook with the title: ‘Deal or No Deal???’ The post on the GMP Trafford North Facebook page shows the rucksack and multiple small plastic bags with white powder inside, along with a Community Payback card with the person’s name blanked out. https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/offbeat/man-leaves-rucksack-full-of-drugs-on-tram-along-with-his-name-and-address/ar-AACACZR?li=AAnZ9Ug

Fossil 'sea monster' found in Antarctica was the heaviest of its kind Joshua Rapp Learn An illustration shows an elasmosaur swimming through rough waters. A fossil from Antarctica is now the heaviest known animal in this group of prehistoric marine reptiles. It took decades of struggling with the weather on a small, desolate island off the Antarctic Peninsula. But now, finally unearthed the heaviest known elasmosaur, an ancient aquatic reptile that swam the seas of the Cretaceous period alongside the dinosaurs. The animal would have weighed as much as 15 tons, and it is now one of the most complete ancient reptile fossils ever discovered in Antarctica. Elasmosaurs make up a family of the plesiosaurs, which represent some of the largest sea creatures of the Cretaceous. Plesiosaurs generally look a little like large manatees with giraffe necks and snake-like heads, though they have four flippers rather than a manatee’s three. (Find out about a plesiosaur fossil found with a baby preserved in its body.) The team thinks the newly described heavyweight belongs to the genus Aristonectes, a group whose species have been seen as outliers to other elasmosaurs, since they differed so much from fossilized specimens discovered in the U.S. This genus, found in the Southern Hemisphere, is characterized by shorter necks and larger skulls. “For years it was a mystery ... we didn’t know if they were elasmosaurs or not,” says José O’Gorman, a paleontologist with the National Scientific and Technical Research Council of Argentina (CONICET) who is based at the Museum of La Plata near Buenos Aires. “They were some kind of weird plesiosaurs that nobody knew.” Researchers needed a more complete specimen, and as it happened, William Zinsmeister of Purdue University had discovered a potential candidate on Seymour Island—just south of the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula—during a 1989 expedition. At the time, though, he didn’t have the resources to excavate the fossil find, but he informed researchers in Argentina about the discovery. Glacial excavations The Argentina Antarctic Institute got involved and started excavating the fossil as part of its annual summer research expeditions, but the giant reptile was uncovered at a glacial pace due to weather and logistics. O’Gorman, who was five years old when the fossil was discovered, went on the first of these trips starting in 2012. Work could only happen for a few weeks in January and early February, and some years the dig didn’t happen at all because of conditions and limited resources. On active days, the team had to wait for the sun to defrost the soil before they could excavate, and every piece wrested from the dirt would then need to be shipped by helicopter to the Argentine Marambio Base a few miles away. “The weather is one of the problems. The weather controls all. Maybe one day you can work, and the next day you cannot because you have a snowstorm,” O’Gorman says. “It takes a little more effort and logistics in the first place, and not just everyone stumbles into those fossils,” agrees Anne Schulp, vertebrate palaeontologist at Utrecht University in the Netherlands and the Naturalis Biodiversity Center who was not involved in the research. A colossus among giants The excavation finally finished in 2017, yielding a substantial portion of the animal’s skeleton, which O’Gorman and his colleagues describe in their recent paper in Cretaceous Research. “We don’t have a skull, but we have a lot of pieces of the specimen,” O’Gorman says. They estimate that the as-yet-unnamed elasmosaur weighed between 11.8 tons and 14.8 tons, with a head-to-tail length of nearly 40 feet. While some previously known Aristonectes have weighed about 11 tons or so, most other elasmosaurs only come in at around five tons. “That guy is big!” Schulp says from looking at photos of the bones. He thinks the work is well done, and he’s happy that the team hasn’t jumped to hasty conclusions—O’Gorman even hesitates to say whether the species is definitely from the Aristonectes genus, since further evidence may put the species in a new genus entirely. Last call of the Cretaceous Schulp has worked on some plesiosaurs from the Netherlands, but he says the aquatic reptiles are very different in the Southern Hemisphere. The new specimen is also very interesting because it dates so close to the end of the Cretaceous—just 30,000 years before the mass extinction event that wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs about 66 million years ago. A lot of marine life would have needed to thrive there to satisfy the appetite of such a large creature, so the fact that these animals continued to exist so late in the Cretaceous adds to the evidence that the aquatic world, at least, was doing just fine right up until the sudden mass extinction. (Would the dinosaurs have died out if not for that asteroid? Here’s the science.) “Even in Antarctica, there were lots of happy elasmosaurs,” Schulp says. The different morphology of this species also shows that specialization was still happening at this late point in the existence of plesiosaurs. “It’s definitely an indication that toward the end of the Cretaceous, [plesiosaurs] managed to expand their feeding repertoire,” Schulp says. While the animal’s exact diet can’t be known without fossilized stomach contents or other evidence, O’Gorman says that it likely fed on crustaceans and small fish, based on the small size of its teeth. And work on the bones unearthed over the past few decades has just begun; now that they are housed in a museum, O’Gorman says there is a lot of other research that can be done on this ancient specimen. Schulp adds that the work moves our knowledge of plesiosaurs forward, and he is excited to see Argentine paleontologists go back out there and find more fossils. “The Southern Hemisphere—at least the plesiosaurs—could definitely use some attention,” he says. And for his part, O’Gorman seems thrilled with the whole experience: “It was quite cold, and quite cool, too. It was an adventure.” https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/offbeat/fossil-sea-monster-found-in-antarctica-was-the-heaviest-of-its-kind/ar-AACxsfq

New Pinocchio frog species has a strange, pointy nose National Geographic In the mountainous forests of New Guinea, scientists have described a new kind of tree frog whose males sport a single, fleshy spike on their nose. Ladies and gentlemen, meet the northern Pinocchio frog. Paul Oliver, a herpetologist at the Queensland Museum and Griffith University in Australia, actually discovered these curious-looking amphibians on a field expedition back in 2008, while he and his crew were hiding from the rain in Indonesia’s Foja Mountains. He happened to look over and spot the mottled green, brown, and yellow frog sitting atop a bag of rice. “You could say it found us, rather than we found it,” says Oliver, who officially described the new species, Litoria Pinocchio, in the latest issue of Zootaxa. The Pinocchio frog is just one of a handful of New Guinea treefrogs in the same genus that sport these spiky noses, or rostrums. Oliver and his team described two other new species in another recent paper, also in Zootaxa. Now, Oliver and his colleagues are hard at work trying to figure out what that adorable little schnozzes are for. “What is particularly striking is that it is erectile,” Oliver says in an email. “At times it sticks out quite straight, while at other times it droops downward. So, they are pretty elaborate structures that must have some purpose.” (Read about an “extinct” Pinocchio lizard rediscovered in Ecuador.) Nosing around One theory is that the nose attracts females—but that is problematic, he says. “When other biologists have looked at breeding choruses of spike-nose frogs, they have found that there is no pattern in the lengths of spikes on the males the females mate with,” he says. Oliver also suspects the spikes could help the frogs identify one species from another in the species-rich forests. With more than 450 species of frogs already described, and many more out there yet to be discovered, New Guinea—the world’s second-largest island—has more frog species than any other island in the world. “I tend to favour the second theory,” says Oliver. “But the truth is, like so much in biology, we don’t really know.” “Island of opportunity” Though we don’t tend to think of the southern Pacific island—divided between Indonesia and Papua New Guinea—as a frog paradise, New Guinea has a similar number of frogs per area as the Amazon rainforest, notes Debbie Bower, a conservation biologist at the University of New England in Australia. “Continued discoveries of unique species that have remained unknown to science demonstrate how little we know about biodiversity in remote places like New Guinea,” says Bower. “The Pinocchio frog is one such example and highlights how important it is to enact conservation strategies that prevent and prepare for key threats like the amphibian chytrid fungus.” In fact, Bower describes New Guinea—which is so far free of chytrid—as an “island of opportunity,” because it could become a safe haven for the world’s amphibians. She published a recent paper in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment calling on New Guinea to plan now for the fungus’ arrival and slow its spread if it arrives. “If we do not focus research and conservation in refuges like New Guinea,” she says, “we risk losing species that we did not know existed.” https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/offbeat/new-pinocchio-frog-species-has-a-strange-pointy-nose/ar-AACA6Cw#image=AACxWwv|2

Nasa to open International Space Station to tourists Nasa is to allow tourists to visit the International Space Station from 2020, priced at $35,000 (£27,500) per night. The US space agency said it would open the orbiting station to tourism and other business ventures. There will be up to two short private astronaut missions per year, said Robyn Gatens, the deputy director of the ISS. Nasa said that private astronauts would be permitted to travel to the ISS for up to 30 days, travelling on US spacecraft. "Nasa is opening the International Space Station to commercial opportunities and marketing these opportunities as we've never done before," chief financial officer Jeff DeWit said in New York. Nasa said that private commercial entities would be responsible for determining crew composition and ensuring that the private astronauts meet the medical and training requirements for spaceflight. The two companies hired by Nasa are Elon Musk's SpaceX, which will use its Dragon capsule, and Boeing, which is building a spacecraft called the Starliner. These companies are likely to charge any private astronaut a similar "taxi fare" to what they intend to charge Nasa for its astronauts - close to $60m per flight. Nasa had previously banned any commercial use of the space station and prohibited astronauts from taking part in for-profit research. Nasa does not own the station, however - it was built, beginning in 1998, with Russia, which has taken a more relaxed approach in recent decades to commerce. In 2001, US businessman Dennis Tito became the first tourist to visit when he paid Russia around $20 million for a round trip. Nasa's announcement on Friday is part of a move towards full privatisation of the ISS. US President Donald Trump published a budget last year which called for the station to be defunded by the government by 2025. The space agency recently announced that it planned to return to the moon by 2024, taking the first woman there and the first person in decades. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-48560874

They should tie her to a tree and let the animals eat her, people like this make me sick.

Rain, Rain, Glorius Rain, it even wiped out the Cricket Pakistan & Sri Lanka, @Stick With Azeem must have seen that happening as he was worried about rain in the Cricket thread, me and the wife managed to get back home from taking wee Kaiden for a meal at McDonald's before the heavens opened up.

As mentioned, watched the Battle of the Bulge last night, 10/10 for me

Yep Cricket World Cup: Pakistan v Sri Lanka delayed by rain https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/cricket/48554799

It was lovely to see again the great Eusébio in colour this time, congratulating Stepney when he made that save from him, clapping his hands and patting him on the back

That's Carey gone now, the Aussies were just re-building the score too, 148-6 (31.2), Smith still holding the fort on 43.

80/5 now with Smith holding the fort, the Windies bowlers should doctor the ball with sandpaper and get Smith out... cough, cough