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A rare copy of the first ever atlas of England and Wales has sold for more than £100,000 at auction. Christopher Saxton was a Yorkshire-born surveyor who is known as the ‘father of English cartography’. And in the 1570s he spent seven years travelling around England and Wales for Thomas Seckford, who was the master of requests to Queen Elizabeth. His maps were engraved and printed between 1574 and 1578 and were first issued in atlas form in 1579. This...

Philip Hammond will present the Budget next week amidst new global figures that show the UK is now bottom of the growth league among major economies in Europe and North America. The data on GDP up to Q3 2017 puts Britain significantly behind its peers, dropping below Belgium, Italy and France. The UK economy expanded by just 0.4 per cent in the third quarter of this year, new early estimates from the Office for National Statistics show, which brings the year-on-year...

The harsh austerity plan rolled out under consecutive Conservative governments has been linked to 120,000 deaths in Britain. According to a damning landmark study there were 45,000 more deaths in the first four years of Tory-led efficiencies than would have been expected if funding had stayed at pre-election levels. On this trajectory that could rise to nearly 200,000 excess deaths by the end of 2020. The study, published in BMJ Open today, identified that mortality rates in the UK had declined...

Perhaps the best thing to come out of the US election was comic and impressionist Peter Serafinowicz’s Sassy Trump. Voicing Donald Trump’s actual words – only voiced “0.001% more catty” –  helped us appreciate quite how shockingly barmy the flamboyant reality TV star’s outrageous ramblings really are. (Watch a fabulous example below.) And now audio visual remixing wizard Eclectic Method has remixed and cut up Peter Serafiowicz’s Sassy Trump videos into one bizarre musical tirade - and remember these are all actually...

Carole Cadwalladr more than any other journalist has pursued the sinister funnel of money and connections between fixers involved in the Trump and Brexit campaigns, including Leave.EU, Ukip and their backer Arron Banks. She has written about Russian meddling and fake social media accounts spreading disinformation just before the Brexit vote - a story finally picked up by the rest of the media. Her articles about Cambridge Analytica LLC and SCL Elections Limited bought by Robert Mercer the secretive hedge fund billionaire and...

Greggs the bakers have had to apologise profusely for a tongue-in-cheek nativity scene in a promotional photo for its first ever advent calendar with a sausage roll in the place of baby Jesus. “We’re really sorry to have caused any offence, this was never our intention,” the bakers apologised, though they said they would not be withdrawing their advent calendar. But an apology wouldn’t suffice for critics from the The UK Evangelical Alliance who accused Greggs of a “manufacturing a scandal...

X-Rays have revealed the source of the destructive power behind parrotfish teeth. Researchers have found an Interwoven crystal structure is the key to their coral-crunching ability. The hardy gnashers of the parrotfish allow it to chomp on coral all day long, ultimately chewing and grinding it up through digestion into fine sand. A single parrotfish can produce hundreds of pounds of sand each year. Now, a study has revealed a chain mail-like woven microstructure that gives parrotfish teeth their remarkable...

Sexist, misogynistic and with a list of sexual misconduct allegations that would make even Harvey Weinstein blush, Donald Trump has hardly been the face of feminism in his first year in office - But he has done one remarkable thing for US women. Emily's List, which helps elect pro-choice Democratic female candidates to office, recently announced that over 20,000 women have reached out to the organisation since Election Day about running for office. That compares to just 992 applicants in 2016. An additional 8,000 people...

Companies with high levels of staff satisfaction perform better financially, according to new research from the University of East Anglia (UEA). The study examined the effect of staff satisfaction on corporate performance using employees’ online reviews of where they work. Writing in the journal Economic Letters, the researchers from Norwich Business School say that firms rated highly by their current employees in terms of satisfaction achieve greater financial performance compared to firms characterised by low levels of employee satisfaction. They...