Stories by Felicity Muth

Imagine that you walk into a room, where three people are sitting, facing you. Their faces are oriented towards you, but all three of them have their eyes directed towards the left side of the room.

In many animals, males give females a gift in the hope of getting to mate with her. This might sound overly simplistic, but this really can be how it happens.

When we think of animals doing tricks, we’re likely to think of dogs               or maybe even a parrot                 But you probably didn’t think of bumblebees.

  After glancing at the people in the photo above, what did you think? Perhaps you just thought ‘four people’, or ‘older people’, but it’s likely if I asked you to describe it you would say, ‘two men, two women’.

Mice, like us, are social animals. As social animals they like to hang out with each other. Also like us, they don't just hang out with anyone.

Despite having the underwhelming name the `common wall lizard', this lizard sports some amazing colours on its underside. Although its back is a boring brown colour, presumably to be less visible to predators, the males have some fabulous colours on their bellies, as well as UV-blue patches down their sides (sadly not visible to us).

A few months ago I moved to Reno, Nevada. Although I haven't been to a casino yet myself, living in a so-called `casino town' makes you acutely aware of the effects of gambling on people.

Regardless what you might think of spiders, once you find out a bit about their behaviour it's hard to deny that they are at the very least, interesting animals.

I recently realised that I had published 50 blog posts here at Scientific American Mind. When I first became interested in science writing as a PhD student a few years ago, I had no idea that I would end up having the privilege of writing for an online science magazine of such high calibre.

Article by Amy Deacon   People eat fish, Grogan. Fish dont eat people reassures the camp leader in the film Piranha, shortly before a shoal of incredibly voracious fish turn the waters alongside the camp site red, in a savage attack on innocent bathers.

It is well known that animals are affected by human noise pollution. For example, dark-eyed junco birds that live in cities sing both louder and with a different song than their countryside counterparts.

Imagine that youre being attacked by a lion. Or if you happen to be a lion-wrestler, imagine that its a shark. How hard are you going to fight back?

Whether there exist differences between boys and girls is passionately debated (for example, see this debate about gender disparity between Stephen Pinker and Elizabeth Spelke).

Brittany Fallon is a PhD candidate at the Universit de Neuchtel who works on the Sonso chimpanzee community of the Budongo Forest Reserve in Uganda.

After a brilliant first day at the social insect conference held at Royal Holloway, University of London, the second day was also filled with interesting and stimulating talks.

This might seem perplexing to some, but Ive just spent two days listening to talks and meeting with people who all work on social insects. And it was great.

Pacifica Sommers is a PhD candidate at the University of Arizona. Here she tells us about this unusual mouse behaviour she witnessed when doing research.

Think about all the decisions you’ve made today. Even if you’re reading this in the morning, you’ve probably already made hundreds or even thousands of decisions, without even thinking consciously about most of them.

In many species, male and females look different to each other. In these ‘sexually dimorphic’ species, males tend to be more ornamented. ‘Ornaments’ are basically anything that’s just for decoration with no other function, the classic example being the peacock’s tail.

One of my guilty pleasures is sci-fi movies featuring animal behaviour, especially when it’s done terribly. For something different from my usual articles, I decided that for Hallowe’en I’d highlight my top ten favourite good-bad movies that feature animal behaviour as a main theme (even if not intended that way).

One of my favourite animals that I only discovered existed recently has to be the happy wren. Not only is it happy (just look at this photo), but it also duets with its partner in such a synchronised way that they are often mistaken for a single bird.

Eran Levin is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Arizona, and has previously written for my blog on the topic of how blacklighting works.

Kate Cross is a researcher at the University of St Andrews and performs stand-up comedy for the Bright Club. Here she explains why scientists shouldn’t be scared to stand up and tell a few jokes   What’s this all about then?

Think about where you’ve been today, and how you found your way there. As humans, we use different navigational techniques at different times.