Unfortunately for lovers of dust and beautifully over-engineered gear, the room-sized recording console is dying out fast, replaced by software and small, neat, racks of pre-amps and analog summing mixers.

ENGADGET: Music Thing: Frontier Alphatrack

The research team has discovered that it is much harder for her to feed close to the surface - a possible clue to why her kind is dying out.

BBC: Sea lion test to probe declines

Jan Vennegoor of Hesselink struck the winner in the dying minutes against 10-man Stoke at the weekend to haul themselves out of the Barclays Premier League relegation zone.

BBC: Players support Brown - Bullard

At the outset Mr Padoa-Schioppa insisted that stringent measures were needed to rein in a budget deficit that had got out of hand in the dying months of Silvio Berlusconi's centre-right government.

ECONOMIST: The budget passes, but more troubles loom ahead

Yet in the dying days of his relatively short eight-year papacy, Pope Benedict XVI has been putting out new coded phrases which, upon analysis, reveal the extent of his frustration at the administrative infighting he has had to endure among mainly Italian careerist clerics inside the Vatican.

BBC: Decoding the Papacy: Benedict XVI's cryptic frustration

That proved costly as in the dying moments of the first-half Forssell poached his team's second goal, prodding in from two yards out after Jerome rose clear at the near post to flick on Larsson's left-wing corner.

BBC: Birmingham 3-0 Middlesbrough

Castres' commitment was rewarded in the dying moments when Tillous-Borde went over in the corner, however the score was purely academic as Northampton closed out the game to ensure they became the first English team to record a 100% pool record since Bath in 2002.

BBC: Castres 12-23 Northampton