The WHO has raised the Swine Flu-which you can follow in this map or through Twitter-to alert level 5, which means a pandemic is imminent. Not funny. Some people, however, are having fun. In Mexico everyone is wearing masks. People are getting bored of wearing the same thing, so they have started to decorate them in all kinds of styles. As you can see, many of them show their always ironic look at death and fascination with los muertos..

After Darth Vader kicked a Jedi Master's ass with the Dark Side of the Crutch, District Judge Andrew Shaw issued an arrest warrant against the Lord of the Sith. After dictating it, he added: "I hope the force will soon be with him" (really-God save the Judge, Queen, and English humor.) Vader arrived later, pleading guilty to assault. During the trial, however, the court found that the events weren't exactly as we were initially told: the Jedis were actually even more moronic than previously imagined. To start with, dork n mero uno-hairdresser Barney Jones-wasn't being interviewed for a documentary on the first Jedi Church of England. He was filming himself, "fighting" with "lightsabers" in the garden, probably while being watched by Yoda, Mace Windu, Obi Wan, and the rest of their imaginary pals, who actually were the only ones with actual girlfriends in the backyard at the time. Vader, whose real name is not Anakin Skywalker but Arwel Wynne Hughes, pleaded guilty, saying in his defense that he had a "chronic alcohol problem" and he didn't remember anything at all. According to the two Joneses, however, Hughes jumped in the gardent shouting "DARTH VADER," wielding a metal crutch, wearing a helmet, a black bin bag, a cape, and with a lot of wine in his stomach. Laughing-presumably hysterically, like anyone would do after consuming "the best part of a 10-litre box of wine"-he proceeded to bang Barney Jones on the head, before smacking the thigh of family nerd cousin, Michael Jones. With almost a box of wine in his body, Vader didn't remember a single thing, but his defense attorney said alcohol was "ruining his life." On the other side, the prosecution added that the two cousins "believe very strongly in the church and their religion." We can only hope the judge will set Vader free and put those two in jail.

Until this moment, I did not know you could fit a whole chicken in a can. The directions on the back use the word "delicious" three times. Mmmmm. It makes the cheeseburger in a can look like a Shackburger. See what the chicken looks like inside and more yummy yum yum by clicking read full story.

Verizon decided to respond to Cablevision's new limited 101Mbps service, and, well, it's a bit contradictory. Essentially, Verizon argues that Cablevision is trying to pump all this bandwidth through their crappy cable infrastructure, and it won't hold up, with bandwidth hogs lowering everybody else's speeds. Furthermore, the true speeds will be slower once users have to deal with the speeds of the servers they're trying to access. Oh, and also, nobody wants such high speeds. But then they start bragging about how fast their service is. But wait, I thought no one wanted fast speeds and, in any case, fast speeds were impossible to actually get thanks to slow servers? Which is it? The fact of the matter is this: Cablevision is offering higher speeds at lower prices than you, Verizon. You can make your BS contradictory arguments all you want, but no one is going to pay you much mind. Offer up higher speeds at lower prices. That is what people will notice. Bring on the battle of the high-speed providers, I say.

Discovery Channel's new Weaponizers mini-series sounds pretty insane: Dudes armor-plate cars, mount them with machine guns and rockets, then hide in bunkers, operating them by remote control in an ultimate to-the-death Carmageddon. Oh my. It's a three-part series from the MythBusters producers, airing May 11 at 9pm on the Discovery Channel. The formula resembles a lot of those DIY reality shows: Two teams of master builders compete against each other to build the sicker, more destructive remote-controlled killmobile. They don't just tear up muscle cars (a la Animal House); these bastards use innocent shuttle buses and, get this, ice cream vans, too. Once built, there are two tiers of competition. First the weaponized cars have to blow up fuel depots or medieval fortresses, stuff that doesn't necessarily fight back, I suppose. In round two, the shit hits high gear, with "a gloves-off test" of combative capability and remote-control driver technique, until the smoke clears and there is only one vehicle left. My guess is, it'll be the one with the wedge.

Turner Designs Hydrocarbon Instruments will be attending the Offshore Technology Conference (OTC), which takes place in Houston from 4 May to 7 May, and exhibiting in booth 4005.

Turner Designs Hydrocarbon Instruments provides the latest oil in water monitoring technology. As the industry leader, we will be exhibiting our offshore duty TD-4100 XD for produced water and the XD for IMO 107(49), certified applications such as deck drains and slops tanks and our low-cost TD-1000C continuous on-line oil in water monitor for cooling water and steam condensate. We will also demonstrate our TD-50…

IBM this week announced plans to pit one of its supercomputers against human contestants on the game show Jeopardy! And the show's producers are game, with host Alex Trebek even filming a faux-Final Jeopardy! segment for a promotional video. IBM spokesperson Michael Loughran says the company hopes to stage a series of sparring matches this year in advance of a final showdown in 2010.

Optics researchers have invented a camera that uses infrared lasers to bounce light off an object, and say the result should leave shutterbugs with a serious case of technology envy. Their device can take 6.1 million pictures in a single second, at a shutter speed of 440 trillionths of a second. Light itself moves just a fraction of a centimeter in that time?. "It's the world's fastest camera" [Wired], says study coauthor Keisuke Goda.

New York has a forgotten one, Texas has a $2 billion wasted one, and Switzerland's building the longest.

Have you ever got lost in a really big size supermarket and wished you had a GPS to find your way around. Well scientists are working on a device which works like a car navigation system that will help elderly and physically challenged people in supermarkets. Oh! I guess I forgot to mention that you should be old enough for such a device.