Gender stereotypes at home may hamper female students’ ability to progress in the classroom, research suggests

Parents are more likely to overestimate maths ability in sons than daughters, according to research that suggests that gender stereotypes at home may hinder the progress of female students.

The findings, presented in a lecture at University College London this week, found that parents tend to be overconfident about their children’s academic performance in reading and maths regardless of gender. But, in maths, parents overestimated boys’ skills to a significantly greater extent.

An office drone must suffer the machismo of an Australian coastal town in this barmy, low-budget thriller about a would-be wave-chaser

Here is a gloriously demented B-movie thriller about a middle-aged man who wants to ride a big wave and the grinning local bullies who regard the beach as home soil. “Don’t live here, don’t surf here,” they shout at any luckless tourist who dares to visit picturesque Lunar Bay on Australia’s south-western coast, where the land is heavy with heat and colour. Tempers are fraying; it’s a hundred degrees in the shade. The picture crash-lands at the Cannes film festival like a wild-eyed, brawling drunk.

The middle-aged man is unnamed, so let’s call him Nic Cage. Lorcan Finnegan’s film, after all, is as much about Cage – his image, his career history, his acting pyrotechnics – as it is about surfing or the illusory concept of home. The Surfer sets the star up as a man on the edge – a sad-sack office drone who desperately wants to belong – and then shoves him unceremoniously clear over the cliff-edge. Before long, our hero is living out of his car in the parking lot near the dunes, drinking from puddles, foraging for food from bins, and scheming all the while to make his way down to the shore.

Scientist discovers a cast of recurring characters using burrows in the aftermath of bushfire, after sifting through more than 700,000 images

First came a picture of an inquisitive red-necked wallaby, then an image of a bare-nosed wombat, followed by a couple of shots of the wombat’s burrow with nothing else in the frame.

By the time research scientist Grant Linley had looked through a further 746,670 images, he had seen 48 different species visiting the 28 wombat burrows that he had trained his cameras on.