Walkers have been warned to leave snakes in the countryside alone after dozens of incidents of bites caused by people picking up venomous adders.

With three different winning drivers and marques, the 2012 Formula One season could scarcely have got off to a better start. Jenson Button won for McLaren in Australia; Fernando Alonso won for Ferrari in Malaysia; Nico Rosberg won for Mercedes in China.

Cheryl Cole has told Marie Claire magazine that she'd love to marry Prince Harry

Out of America: The US loves movies about bizarre creatures wreaking havoc. Now it's got them for real

If you go down to the Florida Everglades today, you're in for a big surprise: in the past 12 years, 90 per cent of the wild mammals which once roamed freely through the National Park have gone.

A man tried to board a plane in Argentina with almost 250 poisonous snakes and endangered reptiles in his baggage, each meticulously labelled with its Latin name.

Until now, Bernardo Atxaga's novels and stories, from Obabakoak in 1989 to The Accordionist's Son in 2003, have all dealt with the contemporary history of the Basque Country: its emigration and conflicts. The best-known Basque writer, Atxaga has often expressed frustration at being typecast. Here, in his latest novel, he breaks radically with this subject-matter, though it was written in the Basque language, Euskera, Atxaga's native tongue spoken by no more than a million people. Seven houses in France is set in the Congo in 1903-1904. Atxaga takes it for granted that Belgian imperialism was criminally responsible for this Heart of Darkness. Against this background, his main interest is to explore the feelings and behaviour of the group of white officers confined in the Yangambi garrison.

A man is in custody after being accused of biting a python in what police in California said was apparently an unprovoked attack on a friend's pet snake. The suspect, David Senk, 54, was arrested on suspicion of unlawfully maiming a reptile, Sacramento police said. The snake was badly injured and needed stitches after surgery to its wounds.

The late David Askevold is the kind of artist whose great influence on contemporary art is perhaps best tracked via his influence on other artists. As a teacher at California's CalArts in the 1970s he taught a generation of artists that included Mike Kelley and Tony Oursler, who were intrigued by his experiments in video, installation and photography, opening up, for them, a distinct form of eerie, edgy conceptualism. Indeed, it was Kelley who called him the "Disorientation Scientist", in an obituary in Artforum following Askevold's death in 2008. It's a useful moniker, used as the title of this small retrospective at Camden Arts Centre, in terms of understanding the artist's work, looking at hallucinogenic, psychedelic or dramatic experience with an analytical eye.

It might not look like it can unlock the mysteries of eternal youth and with its wrinkly pink skin, beady eyes and outsize teeth, the naked mole rat resembles a sabretoothed sausage. But the strange-looking mammal has a secret which is fascinating scientists searching for a cure for diseases of old age, particularly cancer.

A snake breeder has been killed by one of his king cobras only days after speaking about how he was trying to save the "dangerous but misunderstood" species from extinction.