If you know absolutely nothing whatsoever about I Am Legend, what follows counts as a SPOILER. Otherwise, as Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth says, "Good news, everybody!" Matt Sullivan forwarded us the news that Popular Mechanics is officially debunking the chain of events in I Am Legend. Their team of scientists and technologists assert that it's all just fiction: retro-viruses causing vampirism, Serengeti-style velds growing in Times Square, gas powered generators working for years, and Manhattan mocked by the sad spectacle of the brick caissons of the Brooklyn Bridge with dangling cables hanging from it. (The upside is no more bridge and tunnel people.)

In the article, Alan Weisman of The World Without Us describes a people-free Manhattan. Dr. W. Ian Lipkin of Laboratory for Immunopathogenesis and Infectious Diseases at Columbia University Medical Center claims that a vampire plague, as described in the film, can't happen: "Viruses don't mutate and become airborne. They typically fall into a couple of different categories-respiratory, STDs and vector-borne like insects, ticks and mosquitoes. They don't change from tick-borne to pneumonic. They just don't do that." Some will be agonized that Popular Mechanics wasted their time dissecting this fantasy, but, if you have a nightmare prone child the article might bring them some comfort. Future issues promise to prove that volcano-style supervillain headquarters are impossible to build, and that a yellow brick road would be unstable and prone to fissures.