Coaxing teenagers to sit down and do their homework is never an easy task. But is it actually worth their while to slave away for hours on end every evening?

Not according to a new study of Spanish secondary school students which has concluded that the optimum amount of homework for children is around one hour a day.

There is an old saying that A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes. This was brought home to me during a radio interview I did on Tuesday night in the wake of the Federal Government’s decision to remove the conscientious objection exemption for vaccination.

I was astonished that in 2015, some of these pieces of misinformation are still out there, and still believed, if the passionate radio callers (and several posts in my Facebook feed) are any indication.

Surveying news headlines in recent years, it seems that cheating is rampant.

In the athletic arena, Lance Armstrong was stripped of his seven Tour de France titles for using performance-enhancing drugs.

In business, some of the world’s largest banks have paid nearly $200 billion – the equivalent of the GDP of New Zealand – in fines over the past six years for cheating.

Astronomers and planetary scientists have been waiting with bated breath for the first detailed close-up images of Ceres, the solar system’s largest asteroid. Now, with NASA’s Dawn spacecraft approaching closer each day, tantalizing new color imagery has revealed new details of the geological processes that formed Ceres.

In a music buying industry now dominated by iTunes and music streaming sites such as Spotify, Napster, Pandora and Jay-Z’s recently released Tidal, the CD and physical music store are reportedly in sharp (and potentially terminal) decline. But a curious development in music consumption has seen vinyl, the format ostensibly rendered extinct by the compact disc with its “perfect” digital sound, make an unlikely, but significant cultural and commercial comeback.

Most people believe – and have been told by health professionals – that it’s essential to finish a course of antibiotics to prevent antibiotic resistance.

But this advice is not only wrong, it could actually be harmful.