And before you think “Well, sure, that’s less than half of what would really be ideal representation, but maybe it’s a sign of progress,” this is the lowest level of gender equity in roles in five years.

Survey results of the day: half of us think that trailers give too much away.

The other half are bloggers who have to watch them anyway and have just given up all hope of every being 100% completely spoiler safe.

It’s a well known maxim that nobody wants to be a redshirt on Star Trek: The Original Series. The proud members of Operations, Engineering, and Security are the space-expendables, the first line of defense, the… well the ones who always get sent down with the away party full of more important characters and get murdered by the space monster of the week. Like, all the time. But what if, instead of considering this from the viewer’s perspective, you considered it from the perspective of a crewman choosing a line of work? What if you’re just a redshirt, and not “this episode’s redshirt?”

Matthew Barsalou took this perspective and applied math to it, and lets just say that Kirk, Chekov, and Sulu might not be to happy about it.

The medium of video games is still very young, and, by its very nature, wildly growing in leaps and bounds as new advances in computer processing and image capturing technology are made and applied to telling stories. While, like comics, they may still be something of a niche pastime to the mainstream, they’re still being played by two-thirds of America. And I would have guess that that number is growing…

If not for a new report from market researchers the NPD Group.

Let this post be a lesson to you. Sometimes, when you do a Google Image search for some unrelated terms, the Internet has exactly what you need. Thanks Internet. You’re still kinda creepy sometimes, but I love you.

National Geographic, which, considering the precise purview implied in their title, you’d think wouldn’t bee to concerned with this, have run an extensive poll trying to figure out what Americans think of alien life, UFOs, and the proper personal and governmental response to an alien visitation.

For some reason this poll also included asking which fictional characters would be best to call upon if aliens showed up, which, understandably, has tickled our fancy. They also asked which presidential candidate would do a better job with it, and the consensus just might be Barak Obama with all the powers of the Hulk.

Have you been reading DC Comics’ new title, Orange Ivy? No? That’s because it doesn’t exist. It’s the new fake title introduced in a second Nielsen Survey the company has put out to gauge readership of their New 52 books. (You may remember us reporting on the first one last September.) Read on to find out how to take the survey and what, if anything, it could mean for your future buying habits.

It’s commonly understood that a movie, or any product really, can sink or swim based on advertising. Too little, too much, not in the right places, or the right times, or just a ads that are misleading or poorly thought out can be pointed to afterward as evidence of Where It All Went Wrong. But a study led by Akira Ishii on the release of twenty five different movies to theaters in Japan seems to say that while advertising can help, the only direct indicator of a movie’s success isn’t how much money is spent on advertising, or even how well the campaign is pulled off.

It’s the online social media buzz surrounding the movie.

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.

The Venture family is no stranger to bad work life balance, why, Rusty arguably got a lot of his bad habits as a father from his own aloof-bordering-on-the-criminally-negligent single dad. But super science aside, the difficulty of building a stable scientific career while also building a stable family is one that gets mentioned a lot, generally in discussions of why there isn’t a more equal presence of women in science and academia. And while there’s conflicting evidence as to whether this is the biggest root of the problem, there’s no doubt that it’s a contributing factor.

According to a new survey by the Association for Women in Science, men and women are actually both significantly fed up with the career structure of the fields of science, specifically how it hinders raising a family.

DC Comics’ Executive Vice President of Sales, Marketing, and Business Development John Rood has given a very interesting interview to Publishers Weekly, regarding the results from the company’s very first Nielsen survey of their readership late last year. In it, he admits, or perhaps clarifies, that the survey is not representative of DC’s entire audience, and has some very interesting news about female readership as portrayed by the survey results.

When the survey’s results were announced last week, showing a dismal lack of brand-new readers, female readers, and young readers to the New 52, there was a lot more that we wanted to know, here at The Mary Sue. Things like the gender demographics from book to book or the gender demographics on digital might have been really interesting to draw conclusions from. The results released last week seemed like just the tip of the iceberg, and Rood reveals a bit more of it in the interview.