Munich Air Disaster anniversary: The picture of that Manchester United team that encapsulates a tragedy

Man Utd Munich air disaster belgrade

Today is February 6, the 62nd anniversary of the Munich Air Disaster.

How supporters choose to remember or memorialise it is their own business. For many, though, the photograph above is the one to get lost in. It’s the most famous. It shows Manchester United’s 1958 side deep in Tito’s Yugoslavia, pictured together for the very last time.

There they are, young, alive and brilliant, with those specks of snow and ice around them on the pitch, harbingers of tomorrow's doom.

The day before, the United squad had had dinner at The Majestic Hotel and walked the streets of Belgrade to watch an English film at a local cinema. These weren’t today’s millionaires, but still young, bright-eyed players high on life and excited for their futures.

Eddie Colman crooned Sinatra’s Come Fly With Me, which had been released the month before. Albert Scanlon had talked about the newest Marilyn Monroe film and, among the propaganda posters and the occasional tank, that would have been a strange kind of culture clash. Boys with the whole world at their feet, skipping between the symbols of oppression.

The next day, they would leave the bowels of the JNA Stadium and run out onto a frozen pitch in the winter sunshine. When the photograph was taken, they would still have been carrying Busby’s final, calming words.

“There are no terrors out there for you boys now.”

United were protecting a 2-1 lead from the first leg and, with goals from Denis Viollet and two from Bobby Charlton, they appeared to put the tie beyond Red Star inside 31 first-half minutes. Back came the Yugoslavians though, erasing that deficit in the quarter of an hour after half-time. Bora Kostic scored twice, Lazar Tasic beat Harry Gregg from the penalty spot. United held on, though. There had been terrors, but they'd been survived.

That night, both sets of players dined together. Afterwards, Busby relaxed a curfew and allowed his players out for an hour. Denis Viollet would drink with journalist and former Manchester City goalkeeper Frank Swift in the hotel bar. Roger Byrne, Bill Foulkes and Albert Scanlon would head to the British embassy’s staff club. Duncan Edwards and Tommy Taylor would drift out into the Belgrade night, eventually finding a bar stool alongside Red Star midfielder Dragoslav Sekularac.

And then, the end. The slush, the snow on the wings, the Football League's deadline and the third attempt at takeoff. Then, the headlines.

In The Footballer Who Could Fly, Duncan Hamilton wrote of his father remembering the news filtering down into the pits and then men emerging up into the light to drink silently, feeling that to enjoy themselves in any way on that day would have been wrong.

There’s a rich library of images documenting those days and weeks after the crash. The sight of Bill Foulkes leading United out again at Old Trafford just 12 days later is deeply affecting and there are many others which convey the literal destruction. The wreckage of the mangled Elizabethan aircraft is hard to bear, so too the pictures of a gravely ill Busby, tented inside his hospital bed. In another, Foulkes and Gregg appear concerned but hopeful, shown looking down on a hospital bed which Edwards would sadly never leave. It’s all dreadful, no matter where you look.

Maybe the most upsetting written account appears in Patrick Barclay’s biography of Sir Matt Busby, The Man Who Made A Football Club:

‘Tommy Taylor would not marry Norma Curtis. Nor continue his rise to international stardom alongside Edwards and Roger Byrne at the World Cup.

Over were the career and carefree life of David Pegg.

The third of the Yorkshire pals, Mark Jones, would never again see his beloved June or toddler Gary. Never see or hold the daughter June would name Lynn. Never again set off across the fields with his faithful dog, who would be adopted by his brother Rick but die within a year.

Nor tend his birds; June advertised for new homes for them, causing a queue of children outside her house in Kings Road.

Barclay’s account of the crash is so well-researched and vivid. It's brilliant but terribly harrowing for its detail. But those human stories are arguably worse, though. They’re upsettingly ordinary in a way which washes the tragedy of that historical gloss.

So perhaps the final line-up in Belgrade is Munich at its gentlest. To look at them there is to know terrible things. Their fate, of course, but also the aftermath: Gladstone Edwards taking a job in Dudley Cemetery to remain close to his son. Roger Byrne never getting to learn that his wife, Joy, was pregnant with the couple’s first child.

But the image’s dull sepia still possesses a quiet spirit. To look at it is to remember how Gregg went back and how he saved Vera and Vesna Lukic. It's to know that Charlton, Busby and Foulkes would all recover to lift the European Cup 10 years later, and that, really, there is a place where they and their fallen team-mates can live forever, side-by-side.

Weatherwatch: the woman who unlocked the secrets of clouds

Dr Joanne Simpson was a trailblazer. In 1949 she became the first woman in the US to earn a PhD in meteorology, and she went on to make significant breakthroughs in understanding clouds.

With her colleague Herbert Riehl, Simpson showed how clouds played a big role in the world’s climate. They realised that tropical cumulonimbus clouds could tower to 15km tall, so high they reached the top of the lower atmosphere. They called these gigantic clouds “hot towers” because they behaved like chimneys, pumping heat and moisture from the ocean’s surface high into the atmosphere.

Dr Joanne Simpson

And in 1958 they came up with an even more revolutionary concept: that about 1,500 of these hot towers spread around the equatorial regions at any one time would get rid of so much heat they would pump hot air away from the tropics, and so play a key role in how the atmosphere circulates around the planet. It was a theory so far ahead of its time that it was verified 20 years later.

Simpson also showed how hot towers around the eye of a hurricane drove the storm. Hurricanes feed on warm, humid air over tropical seas, and the hot towers are the heat engines that turn moist ocean air into furious winds and rains.

What do space companies do with defunct satellites?

Two long-defunct US satellites came within 155 feet of colliding at nearly 33,000 miles per hour on Jan. 29, about 560 miles (900 km) above the Earth. While they passed each other safely, a crash would have generated a cloud of debris that could have threatened any spacecraft in orbit.

That’s why Planet, a leading remote-sensing satellite operator, is choosing to retire five of its satellites early this year. The company wants to make sure to meet a key safety standard adopted by industry and US regulators—that any non-functioning satellite de-orbit, that is, burn up in the atmosphere, within 25 years of ceasing operations.

If that sounds like a long time, consider that the two satellites that nearly crashed this week were launched in 1967 and 1983, and would have de-orbited a decade ago or more if they had followed similar specifications.

Today, satellite operators must obey a set of broad safety standards set by international law and their own domestic regulators; in the US, that’s the Federal Communications Commission. When most satellites were operated by the government or large companies closely tied to it, managing spacecraft was fairly easy.

But now private companies believe they can make big profits by flying satellites, creating a bloom of space traffic: From 2009 to 2018, 230 satellites launched every year. SpaceX added another 60 satellites to its Starlink constellation earlier this week. And market researchers at Euroconsult believe that 990 satellites will be launched annually in the next decade. That has regulators and companies alike scrambling to come up with new standards to ensure a safe operating environment, including even faster de-orbit schedules.

“The time to take action is before things are a crisis, not afterwards,” says Walter Scott, the CTO of satellite operator Maxar, who helped convene an industry group called the Space Safety Coalition. “As we look forward, we see a growing number of satellite constellations being planned, and the cost of access of space has come down where it’s even possible for elementary schools to put a little tiny cubesat in orbit.”

The set of satellites Planet is retiring is called RapidEye, one of the first commercially-built imaging satellite networks. Originally launched by the German company Blackbridge in 2008, Planet purchased the company in 2015 to complement its own Dove imaging satellites.

The RapidEye satellites were designed to operate for seven years, but they are still going strong more than a decade into life. They are being retired this year out of an abundance of caution.

“The system is actually still functional but as time goes by, the chances that something could happen become more and more significant. As a responsible operator, we felt like we had an obligation to make sure that the system will not contribute to the already critical situation of orbital debris,” explains Massimiliano Vitale, a senior vice president at Planet who has worked on the RapidEye satellites since 2006.

That effectively means lowering the altitude of the satellites from 640 km (398 miles) to about 590 km (367 miles), reducing de-orbit time from about 75 years to 25. The closer to Earth satellites are, the more they feel the effects of its atmosphere, which slows them down and allows gravity to pull them closer to Earth, where the atmospheric effects increase, and so on. Some new satellites are being built with “drag sails” to accelerate this process.

Decommissioned satellites also need to remove any onboard energy sources, a process called “passivation,” to prevent any future explosion. That includes exhausting any propellant, draining the batteries and permanently shutting off transmitters to prevent accidental radio interference in the future. “Essentially, it will be a cold piece of metal,” Vitale says.

Most satellites are designed to completely burn up as they descend through the atmosphere at high speed, but some larger vehicles, like space stations, survive re-entry. In that case, they are targeted to impact the planet in a remote section of the South Pacific affectionally called the spacecraft cemetery. Residents include the former Mir space station, numerous uncrewed supply spacecraft, and—almost—the first Chinese space station, Tiangong-1, which crashed into the Pacific a few thousand kilometers away from the aquatic boneyard.

Some satellites are too far from Earth to be effectively de-orbited. In the case of geo-stationary satellites—which fly at high orbits about 36,000 km (22,236 miles) above the Earth, synchronizing their orbit with the rotation of the planet below—it would be impractical to fit them out with enough propellant to fly back down to the atmosphere when their operational lives are over. Instead, they are flown further up, to a graveyard orbit.

Even that isn’t always simple. DirecTV reported last week that one of its satellites, called Spaceway-1, suffered significant damage to its batteries that could cause the vehicle to explode if they are used. For now, Spaceway-1 is powered directly off its solar panels, but the company fears that when the satellite enters Earth’s shadow and must draw on battery power, it could be destroyed—and potentially endanger other satellites. DirecTV is seeking permission to fly the satellite to a graveyard orbit without removing all its propellant, as the best alternative to risking an explosion.

Avoiding such tricky choices is one reason why researchers and start-ups are also looking ahead to develop robotic spacecraft to service and re-fuel satellites for longer duration missions, or snag them and pull them down to a disposal orbit.

Michael "Mad Mike" Hoare, the world's most famous mercenary, dies at 100

Michael "Mad Mike" Hoare, considered the world's most famous mercenary, has died at the age of 100.

His family said in a statement that he died in his sleep at a care facility in Durban, South Africa, on Sunday.

Mr Hoare rose to fame commanding a unit of mercenary troops in the Congo during the 1960s. But he was jailed for three years for hijacking a jet following a failed coup attempt in the Seychelles in 1981.

His son, Chris, described his father as "an officer and a gentleman" with a bit of "pirate thrown in".

He added: "Mike Hoare lived by the philosophy that you get more out of life by living dangerously, so it is all the more remarkable that he lived more than 100 years.

Michael Hoare died at the age of 100 in South Africa on Sunday

"Most people who met Mike described him as a legend, and as an officer and a gentleman; only a few realised there was a bit of pirate thrown in.

"Known as 'Mad Mike', he was short and dapper, impossibly charming, unaccountably enigmatic, always polite, strangely proper, absolutely sane, good natured, a brilliant leader and an absolute legend."

Mr Hoare was born in 1919 in India to Irish parents, and was educated in England.

After serving in the British Army during the Second World War and reaching the rank of major, Mr Hoare qualified as a chartered accountant and emigrated to South Africa in 1948. In 1961 he commanded a unit of mercenary troops in Katanga.

British actors Richard Burton (Richard Walter Jenkins), Roger Moore, Jack Watson, and Irish actor Richard Harris wearing military uniforms in the film The Wild Geese. USA, 1978

Then in 1964-5 he led a unit of 300 mercenaries - which became known as the "Wild Geese" - in the Congo to suppress a Communist-inspired uprising, becoming a household name in many parts of the world.

He was given the nickname "Mad Mike" after East German radio regularly described him as "that mad bloodhound Hoare".

The 1978 film The Wild Geese starred Richard Burton as Colonel Allen Faulkner, a character based heavily on Mr Hoare.

In 1981 Mr Hoare led a failed coup attempt in the Seychelles, and served nearly three years in South African jails for air piracy.

He lived in France for 20 years before returning to South Africa in 2009 and leaves five children - Chris, Tim, Gerry, Mikey and Simon.

‘Deaf’ genius Beethoven was able to hear his final symphony after all

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827), German composer and pianist, portrait by Joseph Karl Stieler.

The one thing everyone knows – or thinks they know – about Ludwig van Beethoven is that he composed some of music’s greatest masterpieces while completely deaf. Compelling as this sounds, the story has a flaw: it may not be true. According to a leading Beethoven expert, the composer still had hearing in his left ear until shortly before his death in 1827.

“This is going to send everybody scurrying to revise biographical concepts about Beethoven,” Theodore Albrecht, professor of musicology at Kent State University, Ohio, told the Observer. Albrecht, who has uncovered crucial evidence in contemporary accounts, believes that although Beethoven suffered severe deterioration in his hearing, he did not lose it “to the very profound depths” that musicologists have assumed.

“Not only was Beethoven not completely deaf at the premiere of his Ninth Symphony in May 1824, he could hear, although increasingly faintly, for at least two years afterwards, probably through the last premiere that he would supervise, his String Quartet in B-flat, Op 130, in March 1826,” Albrecht said.

Beethoven began to lose his hearing in 1798. “If I belonged to any other profession, it would be easier,” he told a friend, “but in my profession it is a frightful state.” Between 1812 and 1816, he tried ear trumpets, with little success. From 1818, he carried blank “conversation books”, in which friends and acquaintances jotted down comments, to which he would reply aloud.

Portrait of Ludwig van Beethoven

One account, dated 1823, tells of the composer visiting his favourite coffee house, where he was approached by a stranger seeking guidance on his own failing hearing. Beethoven scribbled down this advice: “Baths [and] country air could improve many things. Just do not use mechanical devices [ear trumpets] too early; by abstaining from using them, I have fairly preserved my left ear in this way.”

He added: “When possible, [conversing] through writing is better; the hearing will be spared.” In another account, from 1824, a musician visits Beethoven and tells him: “You can already conduct the overture entirely alone … Conducting the whole concert would strain your hearing too much; therefore, I would advise you not to do so.”

“The conversation books are going to be a game-changer,” Albrecht said. Among the surviving examples – two in the composer’s birthplace, the Beethoven-Haus museum in Bonn, and 137 in Berlin State Library – he has so far found 23 direct references to the subject of hearing, and estimates that several dozen more will show “he could still hear something”.

Draft of Beethoven's 'Erlkonig'. Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) a German composer and pianist. Dated 19th century

Some musicologists suggest that, as his hearing worsened, Beethoven favoured lower and middle-range notes in his compositions and began to use high notes again only once he was totally deaf, drawing on memory and imagination. But, looking at the range of pitches used in the final complete symphony, Albrecht dismisses that theory: “I don’t think it holds. Otherwise, what do you do with the piccolo in the Ninth Symphony – up there on top – and the contrabasses down below? All the registers are there. He could hear them with his inner ear. He was amazing.”

Albrecht is now editing the “conversation book” accounts and translating them from German into English for the first time, a mammoth publishing project that will eventually comprise 12 volumes.

British company Boydell & Brewer will publish volume 3 of Beethoven’s Conversation Books in May (£45), following the publication of some of the new research in an article entitled “The Hearing Beethoven”, in The Beethoven Journal this month and (in German) by the Vienna Oboe Journal in March. 

Covering the period from 1818 until the composer’s death, the books’ subjects range from music and politics to shopping lists and errands. Albrecht said that, although a scholarly German-language edition was begun in 1968, its format made it difficult to read and its contents had been misinterpreted. The English translation of this work has extensive footnotes on each page to help readers make sense of the evidence.

He added that these “compelling conversations” will finally allow English-speaking music lovers to hear what Beethoven and his friends were discussing.

Evidence proving that Beethoven could still hear “doesn’t take away from the fact that this man did what he did in the face of overwhelming difficulty”, he noted.

2020 marks the 250th anniversary of the birth of one of the greatest composers of all time. The event will be marked by festivals and programmes across the world.

From Bach to Wagner: The best composers of all time

Some of the most recognizable music in the world was written by composers centuries ago, yet the legacy of their music lives on. To this day, their music continues to be performed by renowned symphony orchestras all around the world.

The legacy of their music also lives on in other ways - widely used in films and television as incidental music, there will be millions of people worldwide who will recognize a piece of music but be unaware of its origin. It is difficult to predict the future, but it may seem likely that the longevity of the likes of Beethoven and Mozart will surpass much of today's modern music.

If you are new to classical music, or just want an idea of what might be the best music to give a try, look no further... 

Modern Africans and Europeans may have more Neanderthal ancestry than previously thought

Today's Africans also have Neanderthal genes ...

 Neanderthal DNA sequences may be more common in modern Africans than previously thought, and different non-African populations have levels of Neanderthal ancestry surprisingly similar to each other, finds a study publishing January 30 in the journal Cell. Researchers arrived at these findings by developing a new statistical method, called IBDmix, to identify Neanderthal sequences in the genomes of modern humans. The results also suggest that African genomes contain Neanderthal sequences in part due to back-migration of ancestors of present-day Europeans. 
"Our study is significant because it provides important new insights into human history and patterns of Neanderthal ancestry in globally diverse populations," says senior study author Joshua Akey of Princeton University. "Our results refine catalogs of genomic regions where Neanderthal sequence was deleterious and advantageous and demonstrate that remnants of Neanderthal genomes survive in every modern human population studied to date."

Past studies have suggested that East Asians have approximately 20% more Neanderthal ancestry compared to Europeans. But the new findings suggest that these estimates may have been biased due to methodological limitations. Previously developed approaches, such as S*, use a modern reference panel—usually an African population assumed to lack Neanderthal ancestry. But if the reference panel unexpectedly contains Neanderthal sequences, then the method will underestimate Neanderthal ancestry in modern humans.

To address this problem, Akey and his colleagues developed IBDmix as a new category of methods for detecting archaic ancestry. Instead of using a modern reference panel, the approach calculates the probability that an individual's genotype is shared identical by descent (IBD) with an archaic reference genome. Compared with S*, IBDmix is a less biased approach because it has higher statistical power for detecting shared archaic sequences and yields fewer false positives.

Today's Africans also have Neanderthal genes ...

The researchers applied IBDmix to 2,504 modern individuals from the 1000 Genomes Project, which represents geographically diverse populations, and used the Altai Neanderthal reference to identify Neanderthal sequence in these individuals. They robustly identified regions of Neanderthal ancestry in Africans for the first time, identifying on average 17 megabases (Mb) of Neanderthal sequence per individual in the African samples analyzed (which corresponds to approximately 0.3% of the genome), compared with less than one megabase reported in previous studies. More than 94% of the Neanderthal sequence identified in African samples was shared with non-Africans.

The researchers also observed levels of Neanderthal ancestry in Europeans (51 Mb/individual), East Asians (55 Mb/individual), and South Asians (55 Mb/individual) that were surprisingly similar to each other. Strikingly, East Asians had only 8% more Neanderthal ancestry compared to Europeans, in contrast to previous reports of 20%. "This suggests that most of the Neanderthal ancestry that individuals have today can be traced back to a common hybridization event involving the population ancestral to all non-Africans, occurring shortly after the Out-of-Africa dispersal," Akey says.

To explore potential explanations for the unexpectedly high Neanderthal ancestry in Africans, the researchers then compared the actual data to simulated genotype data derived from different demographic models. This analysis took into account various sequence characteristics, such as the length of the shared archaic segments, the frequency of these segments in Africans, and the amount of sequence shared exclusively between African and non-African populations.

They found that Africans exclusively share 7.2% of Neanderthal sequence with Europeans, compared with only 2% with East Asians. Simulations showed that low levels of back-migration persisting over the past 20,000 years can replicate features of the data and could therefore be a possible explanation for the observed levels of ancestry among different modern populations. The results suggest that previously developed methods using an African reference population are biased toward underestimating Neanderthal ancestry to a greater extent in Europeans compared to East Asians. "Collectively, these results show that Neanderthal ancestry estimates in East Asians and Europeans were biased due to unaccounted-for back-migrations from European ancestors into Africa," Akey says.

But gene flow went in both directions. The data also suggest that there was a dispersal of modern humans out of Africa approximately 200,000 years ago, and this group hybridized with Neanderthals, introducing modern human DNA into the genomes of Neanderthals. According to the authors, both out-of-Africa and into-Africa dispersals must be accounted for when interpreting global patterns of genomic variation.

"I am struck by the fact that we often conceptualize human history in very simple terms," Akey says. "For example, we often imagine there was a single dispersal out of Africa that happened 60,000 to 80,000 years ago that led to the peopling of the world. However, our results show this history was much more interesting and there were many waves of dispersal out of Africa, some of which led to admixture between modern humans and Neanderthals that we see in the genomes of all living individuals today."

Using IBDmix, the researchers also identified 51 high-frequency Neanderthal haplotypes—sets of DNA variations that tend to be inherited together—in modern humans, including several that were undetected with previously developed methods. For the first time, they detected high-frequency Neanderthal haplotypes in Africans, and regions containing these haplotypes are enriched for genes involved in immune function and ultraviolet-radiation sensitivity. These haplotypes may reflect instances of beneficial Neanderthal sequences being rapidly driven to high frequency in modern humans through a process known as adaptive introgression. "These novel findings provide insight into the evolutionary history of these populations, the selective pressures they faced, and current variation in health and disease," Akey says.
The authors note several limitations of their approach. Because IBDmix requires an archaic reference genome, it is not suitable for discovering sequences shared between modern humans and unknown or unsequenced hominin lineages. In addition, the approach requires sequenced genomes from at least ten individuals for robust inferences. In future studies, Akey and his team plan to apply their approach to additional African populations, functionally characterize Neanderthal sequences that may be advantageous, and study the implications of these archaic sequences in modern human health and disease.

Norton Motorcycles: 122 years of speed for famous brand

Norton is most often associated with decades of competition in the Isle of Man TT race

As globally renowned motorbike builder Norton goes into administration, the BBC looks back on its past glories.

Started by James "Pa" Norton in Birmingham in 1898, the firm was originally a manufacturer of "fittings and parts for the two-wheel trade".

Rem Fowler won the first TT with a Peugeot-engined Norton in May 1907

Between the wars Norton Motorcycles were seen on race tracks around the world

 

The first motorcycles were built in 1902, winning the first Isle of Man TT race in 1907, though they did not carry the famous logo until 1916.

Between the wars Norton was producing over 4,000 road bikes annually, winning the TT race 10 times.

Norton Motorcycles goes into administration

During World War Two the firm withdrew from racing but manufactured almost 100,000 sidevalve motorcycles - almost a quarter of all British military motorcycles.

The 1968 Earls Court motor show saw the introduction of the Commando model and more than 500,000 were produced in the next decade.

Norton produced almost a quarter of all British military motorcycles in World War Two

After the war, Norton pushed hard to capture the civilian market

But the 1970s saw increased competition from Japan and the last Commando was produced in 1976.

Norton had a part in movie (and world) history by appearing in a film of Che Guevara's Motorcycle Diaries

After going through a series of owners, the brand was relaunched in 1989 and enjoyed new TT success, beating a Yamaha to win in 1992, the first victory for a British bike for almost 30 years.

The company was a firm favourite with collectors and starred in vintage vehicle races

New models continued to capture the limelight until just months before the firm went into administration

Norton moved to Donington Park, Leicestershire, in 2008 and the name enjoyed renewed attention with appearances in films like The Motorcycle Diaries and James Bond thriller Spectre.

But owner Stuart Garner warned earlier this year Norton owed tax authorities £300,000 and needed more time to pay.