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Trevor Francis, British football’s first million-pound player, has died at the age of 69. The ex-Birmingham and England striker, who scored Nottingham Forest’s winner in their 1979 European Cup final triumph, earned 52 England caps and later guided Sheffield Wednesday and Birmingham to major finals as a manager. Plymouth-born Francis burst onto the scene as a teenager with Birmingham, making his first-team debut at 16 in 1970. “He died in Spain this morning from a heart attack,” said a spokesperson. Forest shattered the British transfer record when they paid £1.15m for him in 1979, although manager Brian Clough famously claimed the fee was £999,999 to take pressure off the player. He started his career at Birmingham, playing 328 times and scoring 133 goals. In 1971, at just 16 years old, he became the youngest ever player to score four times in Football League history in the Blues’ 4-0 win over Bolton. At international level, he played for England 52 times between 1976 and 1986, scoring 12 goals, and played at the 1982 FIFA World Cup. He earned his record move to Forest in 1979 and headed the winner in the 1-0 victory over Malmo to win the European Cup just a few months later. Francis missed the European Cup win over Hamburg a year later through injury and joined Manchester City in 1981. Spells at Sampdoria, where he won the Coppa Italia, Atalanta, Rangers and QPR – where he was player-manager – followed. He moved to Sheffield Wednesday in 1990 before he replaced Ron Atkinson as manager. Under Francis, the Owls finished third in the old First Division in his first season in charge before finishing seventh in the newly created Premier League while also being runners-up to Arsenal in the 1993 FA Cup and League Cup finals. He left in 1995 and returned to Birmingham the following year, reaching the play-offs three times and also the 2001 League Cup final where they lost to Liverpool. Francis left St Andrew’s in October 2001 and joined Crystal Palace soon after, leaving the Eagles in 2003 in what was his last job. Francis spent half a year in Spain and the rest in Solihull. He suffered a heart attack 11 years ago and had kept himself fit with daily power walks. He had an annual health check through the League Managers’ Association and, according to his spokesman, was “enjoying life very much having eventually got over the death of his wife”. Helen passed away in 2017 after a battle with cancer. Read More Charity boss speaks out over ‘traumatic’ encounter with royal aide Ukraine war’s heaviest fight rages in east - follow live Today at the World Cup: Ary Borges hat-trick has Brazil up and running James Anderson could play until he’s 50, says Saqib Mahmood We’re massively up for it – Zak Crawley says England hungry to end on Oval high

The meaning of life is the ultimate mystery – why do we exist? And is there a point to… well… anything? These are questions to which we may never find answers, but at least we can define what “life” means in scientific terms. And yet, our understanding of what life is is changing all the time, thanks to space exploration. As scientists continue to hunt for life beyond our own world, biologists are having to rethink the meaning of the word “life” itself. Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Generally, biologists explain “life” as connoting a self-sustaining chemical system which is capable of performing functions such as eating, metabolising, excreting, breathing, moving, growing, reproducing, and responding to external stimuli. This definition works pretty well here on Earth (although there are some important exceptions, such as viruses), but experts have pointed out that if life exists elsewhere in the universe, it may not display the same properties that we’re used to. Indeed, it might be unrecognisable as life as we know it (forget those little green men). In which case, how will we spot it if it ever crosses our path? Astrobiologist Sara Imari Walker and chemist Lee Cronin think they’ve come up with a solution. The pair are now arguing that highly complex molecules found in all living creatures can’t exist thanks purely to chance. Therefore, they say, the universe must have a way of creating and reproducing complex information and retaining a “memory” of all of this.. In an interview with New Scientist, Walker, of Arizona State University, explained their radical idea on how objects come into existence. The concept, known as Assembly Theory, explains why certain complex objects have become more abundant than others by considering their histories. If the theory proves correct, it will redefine what we mean by “living” things and show that we’ve been going about the search for extraterrestrial life all wrong. In the process, we could even end up creating alien life in a laboratory, she stressed. In her discussion with New Scientist, Walker pointed out: "An electron can be made anywhere in the universe and has no history. You are also a fundamental object, but with a lot of historical dependency. You might want to cite your age counting back to when you were born, but parts of you are billions of years older. "From this perspective, we should think of ourselves as lineages of propagating information that temporarily finds itself aggregated in an individual." Assembly theory predicts that molecules produced by biological processes must be more complex than those produced by non-biological processes, as Science Alert notes. To test this, Walker and her team analysed a range of organic and inorganic compounds from around the world and outer space, including E. coli bacteria, urine, meteorites and even home-brewed beer. They then smashed up the compounds into smaller pieces and used mass spectrometry to pinpoint their molecular building blocks. They calculated that the smallest number of steps required to reassemble each compound from these building blocks was 15. And whilst some compounds from living systems needed fewer than 15 assembly steps, no inorganic compounds made it above this threshold. "Our system … allows us to search the universe agnostically for evidence of what life does rather than attempting to define what life is," Walker, Cronin, and others wrote in a 2021 Nature Communications article. The handy thing about this building block system – which they’ve dubbed the “'molecular assembly index” – is that it doesn’t rely on carbon-based organic materials to be identified. In other words, an alien could be made of entirely different stuff entirely and we’d still be able to spot it as life using the index. It also works regardless of what stage of “life” an extraterrestrial being is in – whether it is still in its infancy or has moved into a technological stage beyond our understanding. That’s because all of these states produce complex molecules which couldn’t exist in the absence of a living system. If all of this is hurting your head, let’s just get back to the basics: if there is a secret to life, it might all be down to what we do, not what we are. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

Joe Rogan made a reference to Jeff Monson's move to Russia during a conversation with political commentator Dave Smith

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One night after getting into a war of words with the Braves, Mets slugger Pete Alonso was hit by a pitch and had to leave the game with a wrist injury.New York Mets slugger Pete Alonso was a big talking point after his team's first game of the series in Atlanta against the rival Braves on T...

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