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Female guppies, quail and finches tend to mate with males that look like the males they have seen other females paired with. Such “mate choice copying” can pay off. If it is difficult to choose the best mating material, or takes a lot of time and energy, it makes sense to go with what works for the other girls. Yet although human mate selection suffers just such difficulties, there has been little evidence that women do this, until now.

An hourglass figure has long been perceived to be the ideal figure for a woman to have. But New York University researchers have found that to be found attractive, a woman had to move in a feminine way - swaying her hips.

Love really does have a strange effect on people, say scientists. ... They found that men had lower levels of testosterone than normal, while the women had higher levels of the hormone than usual. Men, in some way, had become more like women, and women had become like men.

Nicolas Sarkozy today took a hard line in France's latest row over Islamic dress, saying full veils and face coverings were a sign of women's debasement and "not welcome" on French soil.

Robin Baker puts forward the thesis that evolution has programmed men to conquer and monopolise women while women, without even knowing they are doing it, seek the best genetic input on offer from potential sexual partners. Facts of life presented include: 10 per cent of children are not fathered by their fathers, less than 1 per cent off a man's sperm is capable of fertilizing anything - the rest is there to fight off other men'...

Pong was an arcade game so popular it reportedly sparked a coin shortage in the United States when it launched in 1972.

Monkeys pay more attention to females than to males, according to research.

Houseplants and arranged flowers have brightened up homes for centuries - but it was not until the late 1800s that the trend for bringing nature indoors really took off.