'These represent the next generation of tools to understand complex conditions' says one researcher

More than a third of the world’s conifer species are threatened with extinction as a result of urbanisation, logging, disease and feral goats, according to an alarming new report.

Amol Rajan finds brotherly love at a new family-run restaurant in west London

After a ropey year for British agriculture, with a soggy summer and long winter leaving many farmers empty of pocket and heavy under the eyes, this week brings relief: the 150th Royal Bath & West.

The virus is known to cause pneumonia and sometimes kidney failure

Not everything requires hours of slaving over a hot stove, says our resident man in the kitchen – some dishes are best served cold.

Belgians living in areas completely isolated due to the bubonic plague can finally breathe a sigh of relief: soon they will be able to get online and petition to have a law banning them from writing a will struck down.

It's not often you can walk from a high street into the heart of an ancient woodland. One minute I am in a bustling Yorkshire market town, takeaway cappuccino in hand, the next I am ducking down stone steps to Eller Beck, a strip of canal and river that runs through a steep-sided gorge fringed with ash, oak, sycamore and pine. The buzzing repartee of stall owners is soon replaced by the songs of robins and chaffinches, shop awnings for a weeping willow in bud.

Thousands of Pashmina goats, the source of famed shawls and blankets and a mainstay of the local Himalayan economy, have perished in northern India in the some of the heaviest snowfall in decades.

The death of Richard Briers prompted plaudits and tributes lauding the 79-year-old actor's professional skills and private character in almost equal measure. Well it might. From Hamlet to Ever Decreasing Circles, from Watership Down to Roobarb, for the best part of half a century, Mr Briers has been a much-loved fixture of British television, radio and film.

Serves 4-6

An iconoclastic survey of Wales's highest mountain peak is infused with the writer's identity

Even as instability continues in the Central African Republic, Unicef are doing everything they can to give former child soldiers a proper Christmas day