New research shows that there is a correlation between the amount of time you spend in front of the TV and how long you live.
A study by researchers at the University of Queensland in Australia has concluded that, for every hour of television watched after age 25, the average human lifespan drops by 22 minutes. A person who watch six hours of TV per day will, on average, live five years less than people who spent less time on the couch and in front of the television screen.

The …

Tim Kelsey, No 10′s director of transparency, said that schools and doctors should use the web to cut down paperwork and reduce their costs.
Mr Kelsey said: “We don’t want to have schools spending money on printing school reports nor do we want to have doctors sending out referral letters. That can be done online.”

He compared the shift to the move to online banking, saying the “sleight of hand” by the banks meant customers were “happy to be using the web because they had more control while also doing the banks’ …

The ten years since 2001 have seen a 5.24 percent annual rate of increase in private university tuition. This is a full 60 percent higher than the annual 3.15 percent rate of increase in consumer prices over the same period.
Tuition at private universities follows an oligopolistic structure. In a society where academic attainment and cliques are necessary conditions for highly sought after jobs, private universities have been able to demand high tuition rates without any significant price regulations in place, and students and their parents have had to bite …

Riyadh: The world’s largest women-only university was opened barely two weeks ago by King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. Situated on the outskirts of the capital, Riyadh, the Princess Nora bint Abdulrahman University is ambitious – it has the capacity for 50,000 students and will improve women’s access to courses such as business and science. It has a teaching hospital, laboratories and libraries.

The World Economic Forum global gender gap report in 2010 ranked Saudi Arabia 129 out of 134 countries, and the only country to score a zero for female political …

Scientists have shown that offering a financial reward for doing well can increase their score by up to 20 points on the scale where the average is 100 and Mensa membership is around 150.

The team at the University of Pennsylvania made the findings after setting out to prove that scores in the test were not just related to intelligence but also to motivation.
They looked at 46 previous studies of more than 2,000 children to see if monetary incentives had any bearing on the result.
They found that on average a financial …

“Let me be clear: you need to speak English to learn at our education establishments. If you can’t, we won’t give you a visa.”

This was the stark warning issued by UK home secretary Theresa May in parliament last month as she unveiled tough new rules for student visas aimed at cutting the numbers of migrants using education as a back door into Britain.
May said the changes to the current Tier 4 student visa rules will target private education providers suspected of bending visa rules, reposition the UK as a destination …

Although mothers and fathers want their children to have a mobile phone for safety and social reasons, they now realise it leaves them powerless to stop access to inappropriate internet sites, including pornography, the research has found.

Parents also worry that internet-ready mobile phones leave their offspring open to direct and inappropriate advertising.
The review is due out next month, It suggests that nine out of 10 parents think that their children are growing up too quickly because of increasing sexualisation and commercial pressures, mainly from the internet.
The review has found that …

A comprehensive analysis of 33 studies finds that teaching kids social and emotional skills leads to an average 11 percentile-point gain in their academic performance over six months compared to students who didn’t receive the same instruction.

That’s a big jump, equivalent to a student at the middle of a class’s performance curve moving into the top 40 percent of his or her peers, Sarah Sparks at EdWeek notes. The study’s authors, led by Joseph Durlak, suggest the dramatic gain could be rooted in the physiology of the brain; social-skill instruction …

The use of “textisms” can improve literacy among pupils by giving them extra exposure to word composition outside the school day, it was claimed.

The conclusions come despite fears that the use of abbreviations such as “CU L8R”, “Gr8” and “innit” can undermine children’s reading and writing.
Critics have suggested that text messaging can blur the boundaries between colloquialisms and standard English, with some teachers claiming that slang is now creeping into children’s school work.
But academics from Coventry University said there was “no evidence” that access to mobile phones harmed children’s literacy …

A third of graduate vacancies this year will be filled by applicants who have already worked for their new employer as an undergraduate, according to a poll of 100 recruiters which underlines the increasing value of internships.

The majority of employers said it was unlikely that an undergraduate without any work experience would get a job.
Half of those who will be employed this year by law firms will already have done work experience for that firm, and the proportion is 53% in investment banking, according to a survey of sought-after employers …