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gbandit

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You would think that this will have huge implications for BBC Total Sport;

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-63455192

 

BBC local radio stations will have a significant number of programmes cut under new plans, the corporation has announced.

All 39 networks in England will keep their current schedule from 6am to 2pm, but after that shows will be shared.

There will be 10 local programmes between 6-10pm on weekdays, across the day on Saturday, as well as on Sunday mornings.

 

Live sports programming will not be affected.

 

There will be one "all-England" show from 10pm across the week, and on Sunday afternoons.

These changes will result in the closure of about 48 staff posts, with the BBC explaining it wants to prioritise digital content.

The BBC is also creating 11 investigative reporting teams across the country, focusing on key local issues across TV, radio and online.

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https://www.wired.co.uk/article/mathieu-flamini-decarbonize-chemical-industry

 

Mathieu Flamini Has a Plan to Decarbonize the Chemical Industry

The former soccer player is working to turn agricultural waste into a fossil fuel replacement, reducing emissions and harmful byproducts.

 

 

In 2008, the soccer player Mathieu Flamini moved from Arsenal, where he’d spent four years as a tough but classy midfielder, to AC Milan in Italy’s Serie A. At the same time, unknown to his colleagues in the dressing room at the San Siro, he quietly embarked on another new journey.

 

Flamini, now 38, grew up in Marseille in the south of France. Soccer was his first passion, of course, but living so close to the sea made him aware of sustainability too—he could see the plastic washing up on the shore, and he took inspiration from the environmental activism of the famous explorer Jacques Cousteau.

 

When he moved to Italy, he and a friend—Pasquale Granata—started setting up meetings with scientists and academics, looking for opportunities in the field of sustainability. Over time, they narrowed their focus to “green chemistry” and founded GFBiochemicals.

 

Its main product is an obscure molecule called levulinic acid, which GFBiochemicals has spent a decade figuring out how to mass produce from agricultural waste products. It might sound niche, even boring—a world away from the usual footballer businesses of NFTs and fashion labels—but it could be transformative. It offers, Flamini says, a “plant-based” alternative to oil-derived chemicals that could be used in thousands of products, from paints to cosmetics.

 

Flamini has recently been named CEO of GFBiochemicals, which has secured a €15 million (around $14.9 million) investment to take its products out of the lab and into industry. Levulinic acid is a building block—a platform that can be tweaked and altered to suit the requirements of different industries. GFBiochemicals already has almost 200 patents for plant-based solvents, polyols, and plasticizers—all things that could replace substances extracted from fossil fuels, which have toxic or nonbiodegradable byproducts.

 

“There is a massive transition happening these days in the chemical industry,” Flamini says. “And this transition is being accelerated by two factors.” The first is policy: The European Union is clamping down on thousands of harmful substances and pushing industries to try and replace them with something cleaner. The second driver is public awareness of the potentially harmful impact on ecosystems of chemicals that don’t dissolve over time.

 

“We’re allowing the replacement of those obsolete molecules, which are having a negative impact on the planet, with new molecules that reduce CO2 emissions and are biodegradable and nontoxic,” he says. Flamini adds that the company has done a life-cycle analysis on its plant-based solvent that shows it can cut down CO2 emissions by 80 percent compared to its fossil-fuel derived equivalent.

Flamini hopes to reduce the percentage of extracted oil that is refined and used to make consumer products—a proportion that will increase as countries decarbonize, and which is predicted to hit 50 percent by 2050. “Everyone is talking about fighting climate change and reducing CO2 emissions, but why are we not talking about the petrochemical industry, which affects all of us on a daily basis?” he says.

 

It’s been a long journey to get to this point, and there is still work to do in the slow-moving chemicals industry. It’s not a case of simply swapping GFBiochemical’s plant-based alternative into the existing recipe for, say, paint or shampoo—products will need to be reformulated so that the end consumer can’t tell the difference, and the cost will need to be driven down through economies of scale. In July, the company opened a new factory near Flamini’s hometown of Marseille in an old oil-refining area, and it’s working on deals with some large multinational chemical companies.

 

“We want to be the Intel of the chemical world,” Flamini says. “We have a platform technology that allows us to go across industries, from personal care to home care to agriculture to paints and coatings. We are bringing a technology that is greener and makes the end formulation much more sustainable and much safer for people and for the planet.”

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Interesting little snippet in here about how Sheffield United manage their own Twitter to make sure they give nothing away on social media. I’m pretty sure we do stuff like this on our social media too. Our training images are always carefully selected to ensure we don’t give away too much around team selection or who is or isn’t available.

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The championship is a great league like, there are only twenty points between top and bottom after 18 games and the bottom team have games in hand so it could be even less. There are currently 9 teams who are either already in the playoff zone or are one result away from it and a further four who are two results off it. No one’s even close to being cut adrift at the bottom. It’s exactly what a well functioning league should look like

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On 01/11/2022 at 11:34, HaydnNUFC said:

 

Christ Almighty.

 

May be wrong but I think he lost loads of weight when he was at Leeds. Piled that back on. :lol:

Every FM game I boot up, he instantly hates me. Must just hate Canadians 

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Postponing those games on 10-11 September because of the Queen snuffing it was an absolute masterstroke. :thup:

 

 

You'd think they'd end up being played in the FA Cup replay slots assuming that Man Utd can sort out the outcome of their early ties but what a fuck on for away fans, having to sort out travel and/or accommodation at incredibly short notice.

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11 minutes ago, HaydnNUFC said:

Postponing those games on 10-11 September because of the Queen snuffing it was an absolute masterstroke. :thup:

 

 

You'd think they'd end up being played in the FA Cup replay slots assuming that Man Utd can sort out the outcome of their early ties but what a fuck on for away fans, having to sort out travel and/or accommodation at incredibly short notice.

 

Fuck them.

We had to play three games in the last week of the season when they beat us to the title.

 

So fuck them.

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