With Disney’s acquisition of Marvel Comics, it was only a matter of time before they started to incorporate their new superhero IP into Disney parks, but even though official announcements have been made to that affect, this is the first time we’ve seen a concrete announcement of changes promising an actual Marvel themed park extension.

Unfortunately for the majority of our audience, it’s not going to be anywhere near them.

Somehow I don’t think this is the best example to bring up when arguing that women play videogames, maybe. Something about casting dedicated female gamers as unsupervised children willing to commit crimes to prolong their gaming addiction, maybe? One kid not really being a “population” of female gamers from either a representative or strictly money making standpoint?

Hmm. There might be something to that…

But in the meantime, if not for security cameras, this ten year old would have gotten away with a lot of virtual goods.

If you thought we were safe from impending doom at the hands of our robot overlords, think again. A restaurant in Harbin, China is staffed entirely by robots — 18 of them in all. A robot usher leads you to your seat where robot waitstaff take your order and bring you food cooked by robot chefs. Soon we may be marking Robot Independence Day on our calendars.

Remember Liu Yang, China’s first female taikonaut, who blasted off into space earlier this month? She returned to Earth today when the the Shenzhou-IX spacecraft landed safely in Inner Mongolia at 10:05 local time (02:05 GMT).

We were thrilled to bring you the news last week that China had chosen Liu Yang as their first woman astronaut. Read on for details about the launch, which coincidentally enough, happened very close to the anniversary of trail blazer Sally Ride’s first space mission. 

Finally, a decision! After what seemed like a lot of waffling and delays, China’s space program has finally announced the name of their first female taikonaut: fighter pilot Liu Yang! Beating out Captain Wang Yaping, the 33-year-old captain will board the Shenzhou 9 this weekend and make Chinese history. Not bad for a girl from a working-class background who is known for her “nerves of steel”!

The Trivers-Willard hypothesis is a theory that states that in species that don’t mate in pairs but polygynously (males mate with many females), evolutionary pressure will have created reproductive biology that responds to periods of easy living and periods of hard living by actually skewing the normal 50% chance of producing offspring of one sex or the other. In good times, things would skew towards male offspring, because the easier it is to raise a healthy kid, the better chance your genes have of becoming that dominant male that gets to reproduce with lots of females. In bad times, however, things would skew towards the female. If raising the best male is a longer shot, at least a healthy female will get to reproduce with the healthier males.

Both ground squirrels and red deer populations correlate with the theory, and now, at least according to a study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society, humans do too well. And yes, we’re generally considered to have descended from polygynous apes.

Back in December, we brought you the news that the identities of the possible first Chinese women taikonauts (their word for astronauts) may have inadvertently leaked thanks to a stamp collector in Germany. Now we’ve got some more concrete proof as an unspecified number of women have passed through to final training for the space mission. 

If you’ve been following this blog very closely, and for a very long time (nearly a year), you might remember that last April the Chinese General Bureau of Radio, Film and Television announced that it would no longer be greenlighting shows or films that involved time-travel as a plot element, and this week the saga was unexpectedly, sadly, and undeniably oddly continued. The suicide of two pre-teen girls has been blamed on their belief in the existence of time travel.

So, upon being introduced to iamxiaoli’s YouTube channel by The Daily What, I forwarded it to the only Chinese speaker I know because I had to know why this chick was teaching Chinese with a drugged lady and what looked like David Tennant duct-taped to a chair.

Upon further investigation, it appears that what we’re looking at is mostly a webseries of vague creepyness, under the pretense of teaching possibly-questionable Chinese. And it’s probably not David Tennant, just a guy with big eyes and scruffy hair.

But I’m not going to let all that hard-hitting investigative journalism go to waste, so here. Second video under the cut.