Howard Webb reveals how officials made blunder in not awarding Wolves a penalty at Old Trafford last month as referees’ chief explains VAR decisions on new Premier League show

• The decision for Wolves not to get a penalty at Man United has been explained 
• Webb was joined Michael Owen for the 26-minute programme on Wednesday
• Listen to the latest episode of Mail Sport’s podcast It’s All Kicking Off 

By Nathan Salt For Mailonline

Updated: 18:31 EDT, 5 September 2023

NASA’s James Webb discovers new carbon compound in space that forms the foundations of all known life: Molecule was detected 1,350 light-years from Earth in the Orion Nebula

By Stacy Liberatore For Dailymail.com

Updated: 17:29 EDT, 26 June 2023

If you weren’t depressed before you took the train between Birmingham and Wolverhampton, you will be by the time you get off.

The gloom descends the moment my train slides out of the platform and into Monument Road tunnel at Birmingham New Street station, for I have commenced what is possibly the most depressing rail journey in Britain – a trip to Wolverhampton. The long tunnel was the scene of a decapitation of a trespasser a few years ago.

Bursting out into the sunlight, the train passes through Ladywood – described in 2009 as the poorest constituency in the country by The Campaign to End Child Poverty and once the constituency of Labour firebrand MP Clare Short – famous for her attempts to ban topless models in the tabloids. 

On the right I see run down tower blocks and a housing estate that few would live in by choice – and who can blame them?

Ladywood may have improved slightly since that damming 2009 report, but it’s still a neighbourhood with many social problems. 

As the train progresses, council estates give way to factories – both active and derelict – plus copious amounts of graffiti . 

The canal on the left, obviously having seen better days, doesn’t make a welcoming site and is as far removed from the waterways of Venice (it often being said that Birmingham has more canals than the Italian city) as it’s possible to get. Don’t expect any boater singing ‘Just one cornetto’ here.

Next up are the delights of Soho – a scrapyard piled high with old cars, greeting passengers as they look to their right. Looking to the left are the abutments of the former Harbourne branch line bridge that carried it over the canal. 

Passenger services ceased in 1934, but up until then the railway would run special trains for factory owners and the like, whisking them home to the salubrious suburb to enjoy lunch with their wife. Imagine such a service today!

Unlike Ladywood, Harbourne is still a sought after location for those wishing to live in Birmingham. 

If passengers are really fortunate, they may just be able to catch a glimpse of Winson Green prison, just before arriving at Smethwick Rolfe Street, the first station on the route and a station where one wouldn’t wish to spend any longer than necessary.

Although obviously having being cleared relatively recently, the railway embankments at the bottom of gardens are once again showing signs of rubbish being dumped over the fence. 

Prior to the clean-up, it was not uncommon to see anything from unwanted play things, such as large plastic toys, to household furniture thrown away – leaving the railway with a huge clean-up bill. One council worker at a nearby block of flats told me that someone is employed to walk around the ground at the base of such flats, picking up dirty nappies that people throw off their balconies.

During my journey, I speak with a regular passenger on the route, who says ‘I do wonder what visitors to Birmingham think when they have to pass through this dump before reaching New Street. I mean, it’s a bit of a let down compared to the image that the council portrays of the city.’

Another was more direct , describing it as ‘a complete s**t hole’. A young woman from Dudley, with a pushchair, felt a bit more upbeat, telling me that ‘We ain’t got nothing, but people look out for each other – there’s a real sense of community’.

Things soon get a bit ‘lively’ with the arrival of a pair of revenue protection inspectors, who have the authority to issue penalty fares to ticketless passengers.

The number of passengers without tickets, is astounding. Excuses range from not having enough money on a credit card, to buying a ticket for only part of the journey, because they suddenly changed their mind regarding their destination. 

The inspectors show no mercy, no doubt having heard every excuse going, and dish out £100 penalties – reduced to £50 if paid within 21 days – without a second thought. This includes a family of adults, where no one in the group of four has a ticket.

One piece of Birmingham’s heritage that has not been swept away is the beautifully restored Galton Valley Pumping Station, which can be viewed on the right, shortly after the train departs Rolfe Street – it’s chimney revealing its location. It dates from 1892 and during the summer is open one Saturday a month.

Pushing on, My train is held at a red signal near Sandwell & Dudley station, but at least I have the opportunity to study the remains of a glass works factory, that is nothing more than an empty shell and looks as if it could collapse at any moment. Seagulls circle above, but this is no seaside location.

The station made the headlines for all the wrong reasons when it opened in the 1980s – the driver of the first train forgetting to stop, resulting in all the VIPs being left stranded on the platform.

All the way between Ladywood and Sandwell, the railway has passed through a corridor of factories, council estates, dereliction and warehouses – little that could raise the spirits of passengers – and so it continues for the final ten minutes of the 20 minute journey.

Tipton, once famous as the home of William Perry – AKA prize boxer The Tipton Slasher – flashes by and the train stops at Coseley. Here a most bizarre incident happens. A woman on the opposite platform decides she wants to catch my train, so jumps on the track – just seconds before an Avanti train to Euston roars through the station – and boards my train. The guard sees what happened, but doesn’t say anything. One gets the impression that he’s used to seeing this type of behaviour, and worse, on the route.

Wolverhampton is now but a few minutes away, but the depressing landscape lingers on. More dereliction, more graffiti, more scrap yards and Wolverhampton suburb Heath Town – a place with a terrible reputation – hones into view. The railway is elevated at this point, allowing passengers a grandstand view of something they probably wish they didn’t have to see.

The space between the tracks at Wolverhampton station is home to an abundance of flowers and weeds, one member of platform staff quips ‘We should enter the station for the Chelsea Flower Show’, before telling me that in the days when train lavatories flushed into the track, it was far from uncommon to see tomato plants growing between the rails.

For passengers travelling further north, the pain of having to suffer such desolate views will soon be over, for within minutes of departing Wolverhampton, the view changes to a much greener and pleasant one – allowing passengers to heave a sigh of relief.

Humans are on the cusp of detecting alien life on a distant planet.

This is according to scientists who said that based on all that is known about physics, biology and chemistry, ‘we are not alone’ in the universe.

Experts believe NASA‘s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) – the most powerful device ever launched into space – will help lead the charge in discovering an exoplanet hospitable for life in the next 25 years.

Astrophysicist Sasha Quanz, from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, believes aliens will be confirmed in two and a half decades, but JWST will not do it – its successors will. 

These statements are echoed in a recent study from the University of California that stated extraterrestrials will make contact with humans by 2029, but not with the help of telescopes.

The UC study looked at radio wave transmission sent to Pioneer 10 in 2002 by NASA – a routine protocol to transmit and collect data.

The signal reached a star roughly 27 light-years from our planet as transmission spreads out when they contact an object.

The UC researchers hope this signal was intercepted by extraterrestrials that returned a callback to Earth.

The JWST has already detected carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere of two exoplanets outside our Solar System – the first-ever observations of this kind.

This is because JWST can analyze molecules in the atmosphere of distant worlds and identify those essential for life. 

Building off of the technology and success of JWST, NASA is developing a multi-billion successor tasked with searching for life on Earth-like planets as soon as the early 2040s.

The Habitable Worlds Observatory (HabEx) will specifically examine the air of Earth-like ‘exoplanets’ for signs they could sustain life.

A recent PBS documentary, New Eye on the Universe, explains how JWST is poised to locate creation’s faint fingerprints left in the atmospheres of exoplanets using the telescope’s sophisticated spectroscopes.

JWST was not designed to study exoplanets, just ancient stars in the universe, but its abilities have surpassed expectations due to its powerful technologies. 

‘There are two types of science instruments,’ said Mike Menzel, lead mission systems engineer for JWST, in the PBS show.

‘Cameras that produce images and spectroscopes that produce rainbows.’

The colors of the rainbow form according to a specific molecule detected in an exoplanet’s atmosphere.

‘I think Mike’s analogy of a rainbow is a good one,’ Lee Feinberg, JWST’s optical telescope manager at NASA Goddard, told the DailyMail.com.

‘You’re spreading the light into its different colors, but the key is that what we’re comparing is when the planet is passing in front of the star versus when it’s behind the star.’ 

What helps the JWST make these comparisons, Feinberg says, is that its sensors can see farther past the visible light spectrum than previous telescopes like Hubble could — deep into the infrared light spectrum.

This allows scientists to see the amount of water, sodium, carbon dioxide, and methane lurking in the atmosphere, which they can either dig deeper into the exoplanet or move on to the next.

‘There are a lot of molecules, classic examples being carbon dioxide and water, where the best wavelength to do it is in the infra-red where Webb sees,’ Feinberg told the DailyMail.com.

‘Which is why, very early on,’ Feinberg says, ‘Webb made the first ever confirmed detection of carbon dioxide in an exoplanet’s atmosphere.’

In November 2022, JWST showed just how much it’s become a significant player in the search for alien life after successfully revealing the makeup of an exoplanet’s atmosphere in never before seen detail.

JWST’s powerful instruments captured atoms and molecules, along with signs of active chemistry and clouds – features Hubble and Spitzer could not detect when they observed the planet and those with evidence of signs of life.

The target was WASP-39b, a hot Saturn 700 light-years away from Earth.

‘In 30 years, scientists have gone from barely being able to detect exoplanets to characterizing key chemical clues in their atmospheres, like water, using facilities like the James Webb Space Telescope,’ researchers from Michigan State University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) penned for The Conversation.

JWST telescopes’ work is crucial for future missions capable of looking deeper into an exoplanet.

HabEx will search for potential signs of habitability in the atmospheres of exoplanets by seeking signs of water and other biosignature gases, including oxygen and ozone. 

‘HabEx will be sensitive to all types of planets; however its main goal is, for the first time, to directly image Earth-like exoplanets, and characterize their atmospheric content,’ NASA shared in a statement.

‘What it can do that’s unique will be to actually study the atmospheres of Earth-like planets around sun-like stars,’ Feinberg explained to the DailyMail.com.  ‘Webb can’t quite do that.’

‘Webb can study exoplanets that are around other types of stars. 

‘And it can see really big gaseous planets around sun-like stars,’ Feinberg said. ‘But it cannot see a rocky Earth-like planet and its atmosphere around a sun-like star.’

Like JWST, HabEX will also detect molecules, such as methane and carbon dioxide, to determine if they have concentrations higher than Earth.

Cambridge scientist Emily Mitchell said: ‘We’ve only got one biosignature, here on Earth. 

‘But if we have in ten or 20 years, as my optimistic colleagues suggest, thousands of biosignatures, we can start addressing [the question of whether we are alone in the cosmos].’

She also explained that if HabEx finds oxygen, water and methane in one atmosphere, ‘you could be like, ‘Yeah, that’s definitely life.”