From the OC Register:
The woman was so despondent about the end of the world, she told a NASA scientist via email, that she was contemplating suicide. "I don't know whether she was exaggerating, but I took her at her word," said Donald Yeomans, manager of NASA's near-Earth Object Program at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. …But the fears themselves ought not to be so easily dismissed, says Lilith Mahmud, a cultural anthropologist at UC Irvine who studies political conspiracy theories. Doomsday prophecies have much in common with political conspiracy notions, she says. "They follow a very standard pattern," she said.

For the full story, please visit http://www.ocregister.com/news/nasa-381019-doomsday-earth.html.