A family of Osprey are seen outside the NASA Kennedy Space Center Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) in Cape Canaveral, Florida on Thursday May 13, 2010.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida | Fri Dec 21, 2012 2:12am EST

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - NASA is so sure there will be a December 22, 2012, it has already posted a YouTube video titled "Why the World Didn't End Yesterday."

Scientists say rumors on social media and the Internet of Earth's premature demise have been prompted by a misunderstanding of the ancient Maya calendar, which runs through December 21, 2012.

"It's just the end of the cycle and the beginning of the new one. It's just like on December 31, our calendar comes to an end, but a new calendar for the next year begins on January 1," Don Yeomans, head of NASA's Near-Earth Object program at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said in a separate YouTube video.

According to the story circulating on the Internet, an enormous rogue planet called Niburu is on a collision course with Earth.

"If it were, we would have seen it long ago and it if were invisible somehow, we would have seen its effects on the neighboring planets. Thousands of astronomers who scan the night skies on a daily basis have not seen this," Yeomans said.

Still, thousands of mystics and New Age dreamers have descended on ancient Maya temples across Mexico and Central America hoping to witness the birth of a new era when the day dubbed "end of the world" dawns on Friday.

So is NASA covering up to prevent panic?

"Can you imagine thousands of astronomers keeping the same secret from the public for several years?" Yeomans said.

Initially, Niburu, also known as Planet X, was to impact in May 2003, but when that didn't happen the doomsday date was moved to coincide with the end of one of the cycles of the ancient calendar at winter solstice -- December 21, 2012.

Other celestial events that will not be happening: a planetary alignment causing a massive tidal surge or a total blackout of Earth; a reversal in Earth's rotation; an impact by a giant asteroid; a giant solar storm.

"Since the beginning of recorded time, there have been literally hundreds of thousands of predictions for the end of the world," Yeomans said. "We're still here."

(Editing by Kevin Gray and M.D. Golan)

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Cindy Lee Garcia, an actress in the ''Innocence of Muslims'', an anti-Islam movie that has spawned violent protests across the Muslim world, attends a news conference outside her attorney's office after a court hearing in Los Angeles, California September 20, 2012.

LOS ANGELES | Thu Sep 27, 2012 3:58pm EDT

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - An actress who said she was duped into appearing in an anti-Islam film that stoked violent protests across the Muslim world took her legal bid to federal court on Wednesday in a renewed effort to force it off YouTube.

The lawsuit filed by Cindy Lee Garcia names the popular online video site YouTube and its parent company Google Inc. as defendants, along with the Egyptian-American Coptic Christian from California believed to be behind the making of the film.

Last week, a Los Angeles Superior Court judge denied Garcia's request for a temporary restraining order that would have required YouTube to stop posting the crudely made 13-minute video, finding the actress was unlikely to prevail on the merits of her case in state court.

As in her previous lawsuit, Garcia accused the purported filmmaker of fraud, libel and unfair business practices. But her federal lawsuit also asserts a copyright claim to her performance in the video, titled "The Innocence of Muslims."

Garcia's case was the first known civil litigation stemming from the video, billed as a film trailer, which depicts the Prophet Mohammad as a fool and a sexual deviant. The clip sparked a torrent of anti-American unrest in Egypt, Libya and dozens of other Muslim countries over the past two weeks.

The outbreak of violence coincided with an attack on U.S. diplomatic facilities in Benghazi that killed four Americans, including the U.S. ambassador to Libya.

U.S. and other foreign embassies were also stormed in various cities across the Middle East, Asia and Africa. For many Muslims, any depiction of the prophet is considered blasphemous.

Google has refused to remove the film from YouTube, despite pressure from the White House and others to take it down, though the company has blocked the trailer in Egypt, Libya and other Muslim countries.

COPYRIGHT ISSUE

Garcia's lawyer argued in court last week that her client, who is from Bakersfield, California, has suffered harm similar to a person whose privacy is violated by the unauthorized release of a sex tape.

But Google's attorneys said that the rights of an actor do not protect that person from how a film is perceived.

In her latest lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Santa Clara, California, Garcia says that Google is infringing on the copyright she holds to her performance in the film by distributing the video without her approval via YouTube.

Garcia's lawsuit identifies Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, 55, a Los Angeles-area Coptic man who has served time in federal prison for bank fraud, as the film's producer.

On Saturday, a Pakistani cleric offered a $100,000 reward to anyone who killed the film's maker. Garcia said in her lawsuit that an Egyptian cleric had issued a fatwa, or religious edict, against anyone who served as a director, producer or actor in the video.

According to Garcia, Nakoula operated under the assumed name of Sam Bacile, misleading her and other actors into appearing in a film they believed was an adventure drama called "Desert Warrior."

After the fact, however, she learned that some of her lines spoken in the production had been dubbed over.

The alteration made it look like Garcia "voluntarily performed in a hateful, anti-Islamic production," the lawsuit says, adding that she has "been subjected to credible death threats and is in fear for her life and the life and safety of anyone associated with her."

Nakoula has been in hiding for much of the past two weeks after being questioned by federal authorities looking into whether he may have violated terms of his probation in the making or promotion of the video.

(Reporting by Steve Gorman)

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