London, Sept 30: Boys perform better in education when they are taught by a male teacher, says a new study.

The research was conducted for the Training and Development Agency – the body responsible for teacher training.

The research comes as the number of males qualifying to teach is at its lowest for five years – 23.8 per cent. Only 13 per cent of all primary school teachers are men.

Washington, September 20 : A new mathematical model has shown how plant agriculture actually began much earlier than first thought, pushing back crop development by 10,000 years.

A team led by Dr Robin Allaby from the University of Warwick in the UK developed the model.

Until recently, researchers believed the story of the origin of agriculture was one of a relatively sudden appearance of plant cultivation in the Near East around 10,000 years ago spreading quickly into Europe and dovetailing conveniently with ideas about how quickly language and population genes spread from the Near East to Europe.

London, Sept 19 : ‘Phenomenon’ has been named as the most mispronounced word in the English language in a new survey.

In a study of terms that are tricky to get your tongue around, the word came first, with most people mixing up the letters M and N on a regular basis.

''Anaesthetist'' came second because of quickly moving between the TH to the letters T at the end.

In third place was ''remuneration'', which is often mispronounced as ''renumeration''.

The fourth most difficult word to pronounce, according to the 3,000 people polled, was statistics, with its repeats of the letters t and s. Ethnicity, which is awkward because the n follows a -th, is at five.

Chandigarh, Sep. 19 : With a growing number of people becoming fashion conscious these days, Chandigarh is carving out a niche for itself in the world of fashion. It is all set to become country’s new fashion hub, as being a home to several fashion institutes in Punjab, the satellite city offers a valuable platform for all budding designers in showcasing their creative work.

Many Bollywood stars along with India’s top fashion models recently walked the ramp during a fashion show ‘INIFD Designer Medley’. They were wearing collections of students graduating from International Institute of Fashion Design.

Melbourne, Sept 18 : A new survey has found that over 40 percent of law students suffer from depression, with little improvement in sight when they become barristers and solicitors.

According to the study, almost a third of solicitors and one-in-five barristers suffer psychological distress associated with disability.

Professor Ian Hickie, from the Brain and Mind Research Institute in New South Wales (NSW), said that the survey of 738 students, 924 solicitors and 751 barristers supported earlier findings that consistently ranked lawyers first in surveys of depression.

Ahmedabad, Sep. 18 : Gujarat Higher Secondary Education Board has decided to introduce ''open book examinations'' system for standard VIII to X students, enabling them to refer the books while taking exams.

The Gujarat Secondary and Higher Secondary Education Board (GSHSEB), which is half way into this academic session (2008 to 09), has decided to introduce the Open Book format of examination for the VIII, IX and X standard classes.