Brian Dunning hosts this episode of his web series inFact by taking apart the claim that a global catastrophe would kill millions on December 21, 2012. He traces the date to the Mayan Long Count calendar, which simply resets every baktun, roughly 394 years, an event the Mayans themselves treated as a New Year's party rather than an apocalypse. Dunning follows the panic to its actual sources: astrologers who moved the start of the Age of Aquarius from 2600 to 2012 to fit the story, and an old internet hoax about a planet called Nibiru colliding with Earth, first predicted for 2003 and simply recycled with a new date. A Sumerian carving cited as proof of ancient astronomical knowledge gets the same scrutiny. He also explains the one real 2012 event, the sun's magnetic pole reversal, which happens on an ordinary 11-year cycle and has never destroyed anything. He closes by citing James Randi's Encyclopedia of Claims, which lists 44 previous failed end-of-world predictions, making 2012 simply the next in line.