End of the Earth Postponed
News – The Kukulkan pyramid stands at the Mayan ruins of Chichen Itza in Mexico's Yucatan peninsula July 7, …
It's a good news/bad news situation for believers in the 2012 Mayan apocalypse. The good news is that the Mayan "Long Count" calendar may not end on Dec. 21, 2012 (and, by extension, the world may not end along with it). The bad news for prophecy believers? If the calendar doesn't end in December 2012, no one knows when it actually will - or if it has already.
A new critique, published as a chapter in the new textbook "Calendars and Years II: Astronomy and Time in the Ancient and Medieval World" (Oxbow Books, 2010), argues that the accepted conversions of dates from Mayan to the modern calendar may be off by as much as 50 or 100 years. That would throw the supposed and overhyped 2012 apocalypse off by decades and cast into doubt the dates of historical Mayan events. (The doomsday worries are based on the fact that the Mayan calendar ends in 2012, much as our year ends on Dec. 31.)
The Mayan calendar was converted to today's Gregorian calendar using a calculation called the GMT constant, named for the last initials of three early Mayanist researchers. Much of the work emphasized dates recovered from colonial documents that were written in the Mayan language in the Latin alphabet, according to the chapter's author, Gerardo Aldana, University of California, Santa Barbara professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies.
Later, the GMT constant was bolstered by American linguist and anthropologist Floyd Lounsbury, who used data in the Dresden Codex Venus Table, a Mayan calendar and almanac that charts dates relative to the movements of Venus.
"He took the position that his work removed the last obstacle to fully accepting the GMT constant," Aldana said in a statement. "Others took his work even further, suggesting that he had proven the GMT constant to be correct."
But according to Aldana, Lounsbury's evidence is far from irrefutable.
"If the Venus Table cannot be used to prove the FMT as Lounsbury suggests, its acceptance depends on the reliability of the corroborating data," he said. That historical data, he said, is less reliable than the Table itself, causing the argument for the GMT constant to fall "like a stack of cards."
Aldana doesn't have any answers as to what the correct calendar conversion might be, preferring to focus on why the current interpretation may be wrong. Looks like end-of-the-world theorists may need to find another ancient calendar on which to pin their apocalyptic hopes.
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- Original Story: End of the Earth Postponed
For those suffering from high blood pressure the effect of chocolate was so dramatic it could reduce their chances of having a heart attack or stroke by 20 per cent over five years.
Chocolate – and especially dark chocolate – contains chemicals known as flavanols which naturally open up blood vessels in the body.
That means blood flows more easily and the pressure drops.
"You don't always need medication to reduce blood pressure," said Dr Karin Ried, at Adelaide University who carried out the research.
"This shows that there are some foods that can help."
An estimated 15 million people in Britain suffer from high blood pressure, also known as hypertension – around half of them undiagnosed.
About one in 10 sufferers cannot control the condition with medication or cannot tolerate the drugs, leaving them at greater risk.
Hundreds of thousands face a lifetime on medication to reduce the risk of suffering heart disease, strokes or kidney failure.
For the latest research, Dr Ried and her team combined the results of 15 other studies looking at chocolate and cocoa between 1955 and 2009 covering hundreds of people.
They found that for people with hypertension, eating chocolate could reduce the blood pressure by up to five per cent. For those with normal pressure it had no effect.
"This is a significant finding," said Dr Ried.
"We’ve found that consumption can significantly, albeit modestly, reduce blood pressure for people with high blood pressure but not for people with normal blood pressure”.
She said it will take more research to see what is the optimal amount of chocolate that was needed to make the most difference.
She said the studies varied from just one chunk (6g) to a whole bar (100g) a day.
The research was published in the journal BMC Medicine.
People with high blood pressure are seen to have it consistently higher than 140mm Hg systolic or 90mm Hg diastolic. Normal is 90/60.
The results showed that chocolate would make it drop 5mm in systolic pressure which is comparable to the known effects of 30 daily minutes of moderate physical activity such as brisk walking or swimming.
Chocolate has been found to have health giving benefits in the past.
Research published earlier this year showed that people who eat just one bar a week are 22 per cent less likely to suffer a stroke.
However the health giving benefits have to be weighed against its contribution to obesity.
