The special lunch - for international students not returning home at Christmas - was first tried out last year and proved a resounding success.

This recognises both the quantity and quality of talent delivered through the Durham lacrosse programme.

In 2010 spin-off company Durham Graphene Science (DGS) was established, dedicated to the development of a clean and scalable alternative for production of graphene – the “miracle” substance of nanotechnology.

The opening of the £11m East Wing at the Bill Bryson library makes the main library building 42 per cent bigger and provides 500 new study spaces across four floors.

The Bill Bryson library is the largest of five libraries which make up the Durham University Library Service, which is receiving a £22m investment.

New world-class facilities in Durham University's Palace Green Library are to house the Lindisfarne Gospels in summer 2013.

This high-tech instrument could soon answer some of the key questions about the beginnings of the Universe and the formation of its first stars and galaxies.

The Ogden Centre, Durham University's internationally-renowned site for researching fundamental physics, marked its tenth anniversary with a series of lectures in the presence of Professor Peter Higgs. Peter Higgs is one of the physicists whose pioneering work in the 1960s theorised the existence of the Higgs boson, the particle which generates masses for other elementary particles and without which the Universe that we know would be completely different.