NASA planned to reveal the new name Aug. 31, when the space agency also announces which contractor will build the vehicle. Competing for the award are Lockheed Martin and a team made up of Northrop Grumman and Boeing.

The crew exploration vehicle will replace the space shuttle program after it ends in 2010. Earlier this summer, NASA announced the names of the rockets that will propel the crew exploration vehicle and a cargo vehicle, respectively Ares I and Ares V.

"One of the things we get into at NASA is we run around and call things by technical names and acronyms," project manager Skip Hatfield told The Associated Press on Tuesday. "This allows us to have an identity that we can use."

If a collision had occurred, the memory of the Fourth of July fireworks would be dimmed. Pig Out in the Park would have to be canceled for a couple thousand years.

Scientists say that a fatal cosmic concussion probably will come from a giant chunk of rock like 2004 XP14 - one of the many that jump from the asteroid belt under the evil influence of Jupiter - or a comet returning to our solar system. That comet would show up as a stationary but growing dot of light in the night sky.

It would appear stationary because it would be coming straight at us.

Although total planetary destruction is still total planetary destruction, death by comet might be preferable to death by meteor.

The first advantage of a comet impact is that astronomers would be able to give us more time to prepare for extinction. You would not have time to read a thick novel, go on a diet, work a 12-step program or even play an extended game of Monopoly, but you would have time for a frank no-holds-barred talk with your in-laws or to unload some bottled-up grievances to your boss.

A comet also would provide several days of spectacular visual effects with its fluffy ice and vapors streaming behind.

On the other hand, a typical giant meteor would provide nothing to look at until it flamed up for a few scant seconds prior to the explosion that would wipe us all out.

Another reason that we earthlings might prefer oblivion by comet is that the meteor strike has been done before.

Scientists say that dust from a meteor hit filled the air back in 65 million B.C. Most life on Earth was wiped out.

Scientists know this because buried in the Earth at the 65 million year depth is a layer of iridium, a nonbiodegradable element that is relatively rare on Earth but a common component of meteors.

Dinosaur fossils are found below that iridium layer while mammal bones are found above. If we take another big hit, our only comfort is that a life form higher than humans may evolve above our own bones.

Then, like the dinosaurs, we'll be gone but not forgotten forever; after a few million years our successors (the new life forms) will dig up our bones and display them standing naked in their museums with a sign that says, "They didn't know what hit them."

There probably will be scary movies made about us, and they are sure to make disparaging remarks about our tiny brains.

If you want to be "in-the-know" before the Earth is obliterated, go to the Spokane Astronomical Society's Web site, spokaneastronomical.org. The group has lots of free information, and it holds "star parties" where members provide powerful telescopes, free to the public, so you might get a look at the celestial threats that currently are heading our way.

Just don't tell me about it.

Researchers from Advanced Cell Technology have generated stem cell cultures by plucking individual cells from newly fertilized embryos, which are not harmed.

The new technique would be performed on an embryo when it is two days old, after the fertilized egg has divided into eight cells, known as blastomeres.

In fertility clinics, one of these blastomeres can be removed for diagnostic tests, such as for Down's syndrome, and the embryo, now with seven cells, can be implanted in the mother if no defect is found.

Up to now, stem cells have been derived from slightly older embryos. Harvesting these cells destroys the embryo.

Last year, Lanza reported that embryonic stem cell cultures could be derived from the blastomeres of mice. He now says the same can be done with human blastomeres.

Hardline critics of embryo research, however, are unlikely to accept the manipulation even of a single embryonic cell, which they say could theoretically become a human being.

U.S. President George W. Bush last month vetoed a bill that would have required the federal government to fund experiments with newly created human embryonic stem cells.

Professor Vincent Plagnol in the University's Department of Molecular and Computational Biology has said that a study of genes of people from Yoruba and individuals living in Utah with ancestry from Northern and Western Europe revealed the existence of archaic DNA in the genes.

This countered the view that modern humans left Africa and replaced all other existing hominid populations, he said.

"Instead of a population that left Africa 100,000 years ago and replaced all other archaic human groups, we propose that this population interacted with another population that had been in Europe for much longer, maybe 400,000 years," Discovery News quoted Prof. Plagnol, co-author of the study as saying.

For their study, Prof. Plagnol and his colleague Prof. Jeffrey Wall analyzed patterns of ancestral linkage in 135 modern individuals.

Using statistics and computer modelling, they focused on linkage disequilibriums, or sections within genes that did not make sense if only modern human matings were considered.

According to the paper, which was published in PLoS Genetics, missing genetic links only fit if some other hominid population was introduced into the model.

"We considered the data from modern human DNA and fitted a model to explain what we see. We found that a simple model cannot explain the data if we do not add an 'ancestral population.' If this population did not cross with modern humans - or almost did not - the effect is too small to explain the data. We find that a rate of five percent is what is needed to explain what we see," said Prof. Plagnol.

They said that portions of the European genome, such as those associated with nuclear DNA might still harbour the Neanderthal imprint.

Prof. Plagnol said different parts of the genome hade different ancestry, so an individual could have a fraction of a certain chromosome that was inherited from a Neanderthal, but then possess "very typical homo sapiens mtDNA".

Alan Templeton, professor of Evolutionary and Population Programs at the University of Michigan, who also conducted DNA studies and came to similar conclusion said, that "humans who were in Africa and humans who were in Eurasia were regularly interchanging genes".

"There was interbreeding and when humans came out of Africa 100,000 years ago they did not replace these other human populations in Eurasia," he said.

Natascha Kampusch, now 18, broke free yesterday afternoon. Her kidnapper, identified only as Wolfgang P., died last night after he was hit by a train, Koch said. Police are investigating whether he killed himself and are searching his house.

Kampusch disappeared on the morning of March 2, 1998 as she was on her way to school, prompting Austria's largest-ever manhunt. Police interviewed more than 1,000 owners of white mini-vans, the kind of car Kampusch was seen entering the day she went missing.

Kampusch was held captive in Strasshof, about 10 kilometers (6 miles) from Vienna. She was confined to the windowless basement of a house in a residential neighborhood, police said.

Kampusch escaped yesterday after finding a door unlocked, police said. With Wolfgang P. still in the house, she ran to a neighboring garden and told the occupant who she was.

Wolfgang P. was one of the people interviewed in April 1998 because of the make of his car. He told police that he used it to transport construction material and he wasn't investigated further, Vienna police spokesman Erich Zwettler said.

Pluto has been considered a planet since its discovery in 1930 by the American Clyde Tombaugh.

The ninth planet will now effectively be airbrushed out of school and university textbooks.

"The eight planets are Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune," said the IAU resolution, which was passed following a week of stormy debate.

The initial proposal put before the IAU to raise the number of planets in the Solar System to 12 - adding the asteroid Ceres, Pluto's "moon" Charon and the distant object known as 2003 UB313 - met with opposition.

Robin Catchpole, of the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, UK, told the BBC News website: "My own personal opinion was to leave things as they were; I met Clyde Tombaugh and thought how nice it was to shake hands with someone who had discovered a planet.

"But since the IAU brought out the proposal for new planets I had been against it - it was going to be very confusing. The best of the alternatives was to leave the major planets as they are and then demote Pluto. So I think this is a far superior situation."

Louis Friedman, executive director of the Planetary Society in California, US, commented: "The classification doesn't matter. Pluto - and all Solar System objects - are mysterious and exciting new worlds that need to be explored and better understood."

Dwarf planet

Amid dramatic scenes which saw astronomers waving yellow ballot papers in the air, the IAU meeting voted in criteria that define the exact nature of a "planet".

They agreed that to qualify, a celestial body must be in orbit around a star while not itself being a star. It also must be large enough in mass "for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a... nearly round shape, and has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit."

Pluto was automatically disqualified because its oblong orbit overlaps with Neptune's.

It will now join a new category of "dwarf planets".

Pluto's status has been contested for many years as it is further away and considerably smaller than the eight other "traditional" planets in our Solar System.

Its orbit around the Sun is also highly inclined to the plane of those big planets.

In addition, since the early 1990s, astronomers have found several objects of comparable size to Pluto in an outer region of the Solar System called the Kuiper Belt.

Some astronomers have long argued that Pluto belongs with this population of small, icy worlds.

Allowances were once made for Pluto on account of its size. At just 2,360km (1,467 miles) across, Pluto is smaller even than some moons in the Solar System. But until recently, it was still the biggest known object in the Kuiper Belt.

That changed with the discovery of 2003 UB313 by Professor Mike Brown and colleagues at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). After being measured with the Hubble Space Telescope, it was shown to be some 3,000km (1,864 miles) in diameter, making it larger than Pluto.

Named after the god of the underworld in Roman mythology, Pluto orbits the Sun at an average distance of 5.9 billion kilometres (3.7 billion miles) taking 247.9 Earth years to complete a single circuit of the Sun.

An unmanned US spacecraft, New Horizons, is due to fly by Pluto and the Kuiper Belt in 2015.