Of Human Interest: News lite

PRIVATE MOON MISSION

A U.S. company says it has contracted to fly a private mission to the moon next year aboard a modified former Russian intercontinental ballistic missile.

The mission will include capturing detailed images of the lunar surface and crash-landing a capsule containing messages, business cards and cremated remains placed onboard for paying customers.

TransOrbital Inc. said its TrailBlazer craft is designed to be an inexpensive precursor to a variety of private space missions envisioned for the near future.

A specially hardened time capsule in TrailBlazer will hold the messages and memorabilia, which will remain on the moon's surface as a "permanent message to the future," the company said in a statement. Messages can be of varying lengths, beginning with 300 characters, maximum, of text for $16.95. Business cards will travel for $2,500 each.

ZSA ZSA IN L CRASH

Zsa Zsa Gabor, the 84-year-old Hungarian actress whose many diamonds and many husbands made her one of Hollywood's most glamorous personalities of the 1960s, was in a car accident on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles.

Gabor was taken to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center after the car she was riding in went off the street and struck a light pole on Wednesday. She was listed in serious condition.

Drugs and alcohol appear not to be involved, and police say it may have been a case of bad driving.

Gabor has been married eight times and shows a preference for wealthy men, including hotel magnate Conrad Hilton. She was crowned Miss Hungary in 1936 and, after moving to the United States shortly before World War II, acted in films such as "Touch of Evil," "The Girl in the Kremlin," and the 1952 original version of "Moulin Rouge."

(Thanks to UPI's Hil Anderson in Los Angeles)

PLANETS FORM MORE QUICKLY THAN THOUGHT

Instead of planets taking millions of years to form as previously thought, researchers say new calculations suggest they sometimes can form within a few centuries.

"The first one in our model pops up around 150 years," researcher Thomas Quinn, an astrophysicist at the University of Washington in Seattle, tells United Press International. "Things can happen quickly."

The standard theory says it takes a million years or more for the solid cores of gas giants such as Jupiter or Saturn to clump from the cosmic debris that whirls around young stars. After the cores appear it takes another 1 million to 10 million years for envelopes of gas to enshroud them.

The new model from Quinn and colleagues suggests the spinning disks of gas that orbit stars break apart after only a few spins. Fragments then quickly begin to coalesce due to gravity.

"If this really happens out there, then it would probably dominate the way planets form," Quinn says.

(Thanks to UPI's Charles Choi in New York)

MEMO TO MOM AND DAD: DON'T BICKER

A new study suggests children of divorced parents can benefit when they split time between their parents' homes unless their parents are bickering.

Ohio State University researchers say the study finds without parental conflict, children in physical joint-custody arrangements showed fewer behavioral problems than children under the custody of a single parent.

But when the former spouses had frequent disagreements, the children were likely to feel sad, actively intervene into the parental conflict, and behave less cooperatively.

The research notes children are likely to thrive in low-conflict environments, irrespective of the type of custody they are in.