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Techniques Modern Terrorists Use to Stay One Step Ahead of Police
After the terrorist attacks in Brussels and Paris, technology expert Marc Goodman shares how insurgents use their media savvy and technological prowess to outmaneuver law enforcement.
Marc Goodman
Marc Goodman is focused on the disruptive impact of advancing technologies on security, business, and international affairs. He has spent a career in law enforcement and technology. He was appointed futurist-in-residence with the FBI, worked as a senior adviser to Interpol, and served as a street police officer. As the founder of the Future Crimes Institute and the Chair for Policy, Law, and Ethics at Silicon Valley's Singularity University, he continues to investigate the intriguing and often terrifying intersection of science and security, uncovering nascent threats and combating the darker sides of technology.
Marc Goodman: Many people when they think about computer crime they think either of a 17 year old kid in his mom’s basement kind of like the Matthew Broderick in that movie WarGames, or they think about Russian organized crime, Eastern European organized crime. But the fact of the matter is that not only are criminals early adopters of technology but so are terrorists. Terrorists have been using technology for years. If we go back to the first World Trade Center bombing that occurred in 1993 Ramzi Yusef in 1993 was using a laptop. And the information on his laptop was encrypted – in 1993. When the FBI seized him and his laptop they couldn’t read the information and had to send it off to the NSA and it took them a year to break the crypto on that laptop. So this is not a new phenomenon. Fast forward to today. Criminals are using all forms of technologies as are terrorists. We’ve seen terrorists use the Internet for a variety of purposes. I work with the United Nations Counterterrorism Implementation Task Force and on that my role was to study how terrorists were using the Internet. And we saw that terrorists used the Internet for fundraising, right. We see that they use it for operational planning. They use it for propaganda as we see with all of these beheading videos that they put out there.
They’re using it for recruitment. So they have been doing this for years and years and years and unfortunately are quite masterful at it. We’ve seen terrorists use technology as an integral part of their attacks. The 2008 terrorist attack on Mumbai which in my opinion has been the most technologically en masse terrorist attack to date. Not only did those terrorists from an organization called Lashkar-e-Taiba based in Pakistan come into the city of Mumbai with AK47s and RDX explosives and Chinese hand grenades and the like. But they also had Blackberries, smart phones, satellite phones, night vision goggles and the like. And when they landed they had one other invention that the world had never seen before the establishment of a terrorist operation center across the border in Pakistan. There the terrorist commanders monitored the news, for example, CNN, Fox, Al Jazeera, IBN in real time to see what the news media was reporting. And they also monitored the Internet and on several occasions throughout the attack we saw the terrorists see something in BBC for example, BBC reported that the terrorists were, for example, in room 315. The terrorist ops center said hey, they’re in 315. And the terrorists are having a conversation – how did they know? Do you see any cameras? If you do shoot them out. So the terrorists through this ops center, technological operations center is the type of stuff that we see on television shows like Homeland and 24. The terrorists built one of those back in 2008 and were able to operationalize technological information in real time. The biggest example of this that I’ve cited and talked about this in my TED talk was a businessman at the Taj Mahal Hotel. He was staying in a top floor suite of the hotel and the terrorists were going room to room trying to find additional victims. They broke into his room and they said who are you and what are you doing here? And he said oh I’m nobody. I’m just an innocent school teacher.
And the terrorists were dumb but they weren’t that dumb. They know that Indian school teachers don’t stay in suites in the Taj Mahal Hotel. And they found his identification on the bed next to him. They got his name and they phoned it into their terrorist operations center. The terrorists did some Google searching and came up with a photograph and then asked the terrorists on the ground, you know, your hostage, is he heavyset, bald in front? Is he wearing glasses? Yes, that’s the guy. We found him. What should we do? And moments later came the notice from the terrorist commanders – kill him. See we worry about our privacy on Facebook but it turns out even a simple Google search to a terrorist can determine who shall live and who shall die. Terrorists can use these tools, our openness against us. Now of course that’s a black swan event and we don’t want to exaggerate it, but in that case it did make a difference and because of the technological edge that the terrorists had over the police of Mumbai, their ability to escape and monitor the movements of the Indian National Police and the Mumbai police. That terrorist hostage siege lasted not one day, not two days but almost three days. Hundreds of people were killed and hundreds more were gravely wounded that day. Men, women and children lost their lives.
So terrorists are adept at using all of these tools. We’ve had a case a few years ago in Boston where a student by the name of Rezwan Ferdaus at Northeast University bought some drones, a bunch of small scale robotic jets that are one-twentieth scale and can fly at nearly jet speeds. They have jet engines. And his plot was to load them up with explosives and fly one into the Pentagon and one into the Capitol building. And he had purchased the explosives. He had purchased a bunch of AK47s. He had purchased and assembled these jets that he was going to remotely control, fly with explosives into government buildings. So it was only through an FBI informant that this plot was disrupted. So terrorists are using drones. Terrorists are using the Internet. They’re using smart phones and of course they’re using encryption. We’ve seen them use tools like telegrab and even their own home built technological tools. We’ve seen terrorists in the Taliban for example not only fly their own drones but we’ve seen them hack the drones of the United States government and intercept their video feeds that they overfly Iraq and Afghanistan. So Isis and al-Qaeda are quite keen on recruiting new members with scientific and technological backgrounds.
After the terrorist attacks in Brussels and Paris, technology expert Marc Goodman shares how insurgents use their media savvy and technological prowess to outmaneuver law enforcement. Goodman, former futurist-in-residence for the FBI, shares three examples of how terrorists have adapted to conditions on the ground, i.e. police who are trying to stop them, by leveraging the power of digital media, digital search, and digital flight. It's a truly fascinating glance at the battle happening behind the ideological struggle of these opposing forces.
Live on Tuesday | Personal finance in the COVID-19 era
Sallie Krawcheck and Bob Kulhan will be talking money, jobs, and how the pandemic will disproportionally affect women's finances.
04 July, 2020
Big Think LIVE
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<p>
<strong>What should you be doing with your money during the coronavirus financial crisis?</strong> In this Big Think Live session, Sallie Krawcheck, CEO and co-founder of <a href="https://www.ellevest.com/" target="_blank">Ellevest</a>, a financial advisory and investment platform for women, will discuss personal finance and wealth-building career strategies with Bob Kulhan, founder and CEO of <a href="http://businessimprov.com/" target="_blank">Business Improv</a>. What steps can we take to guard ourselves from an uncertain financial future? <strong>Find out on Tuesday at 1 pm ET.</strong><br>
<br>
Ask your questions for Sallie Krawcheck during the Q&A!</p>
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How often do vaccine trials hit paydirt?
Vaccines find more success in development than any other kind of drug, but have been relatively neglected in recent decades.
07 July, 2020
Pedro Vilela/Getty Images
Surprising Science
Vaccines are more likely to get through clinical trials than any other type of drug — but have been given relatively little pharmaceutical industry support during the last two decades, according to a new study by MIT scholars.
<p>Over a two-decade span from January 2000 to January 2020, private-sector vaccine-development efforts succeeded in bringing a drug to market 39.6 percent of the time, the researchers found. By contrast, programs to develop anti-infective therapeutics — medicines that lessen the severity of illness, including antibiotics — succeeded 16.3 percent of the time.</p><p>"The probability of success for vaccines is reliably higher than for any other drug development area," says MIT economist Andrew Lo, co-author of a new paper detailing the study.</p><p>At a glance, that might seem to augur well for drug-development prospects during the Covid-19 pandemic, since over 100 projects globally are aimed at finding a vaccine for the virus. But scientists may be racing to make up for lost time, in a sense — because as the study also shows, vaccine development for some of the world's most dangerous diseases has lagged in recent decades.</p>
<p>For instance: Out of nearly 10,000 drug-development projects in the study, just a relative handful have addressed the high-profile, highly problematic contagions of the last 20 years.</p><p>"If you look at the most significant diseases outside of Covid-19, like MERS, SARS, Ebola, and Zika, among those diseases, there's been a total of only 45 nonvaccine programs initiated over the last two decades for them," Lo notes. "And there's been only one vaccine approved, for Ebola, in December 2019. That's worrisome, because we know for a fact that these diseases are real threats, and yet there's been relatively little attention paid to them."</p><p>The paper, "Estimating Probabilities of Success of Vaccine and Other Anti-Infective Therapeutic Development Programs," was released on May 18 as part of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) working paper series and has been accepted for publication in the <em>Harvard Data Science Review</em>. The authors are Lo, who is the Charles E. and Susan T. Harris Professor in the MIT Sloan School of Management and director of MIT's Laboratory of Financial Engineering; Kien Wei Siah, a PhD candidate in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; and Chi Heem Wong, a PhD candidate in the Computer Science and Artifical Intelligence Laboratory and the Laboratory for Financial Engineering.</p>
<h3>Limited big pharma investment</h3><p>To conduct the study, the scholars examined information collected by Citeline, a firm that maintains proprietary pharmaceutical-industry databases about drug development and clinical trials. The study reviewed 2,544 vaccine programs and 6,829 nonvaccine development programs. After an initial preclinical research and development phase, a drug candidate usually undergoes three formal trial phases in human subjects, the first generally aimed at examining its safety, and the next two more focused on efficacy.</p><p>Among other findings, the scholars identified lower success rates for drug-development programs outside of private industry — such as those led by investigators in academic hospitals. These efforts succeeded 6.8 percent of the time for vaccines and 8.2 percent of the time for therapeutics, something Lo chalks up to the smaller scale of many of the projects.</p><p>"Academic medical centers don't have the resources big pharma does," says Lo.</p><p>Lo also points out that the relatively low success rates for nonvaccine therapeutics, including antibiotics, "jumped out" at him. "I don't think people realize just how important antibiotics are, and how few of them we currently have in our medical arsenal," Lo adds. "We're just not investing enough resources into this critical field."</p><p>The researchers also found widely varying outcomes by types of illnesses. Out of 27 disease categories for which vaccine development efforts occurred, only 12 have seen drugs receive government approval. The disease type with the highest success rate, among those with more than one drug candidate, was rotavirus; in this category 78.7 percent of programs have been successful.</p><p>By contrast — and in addition to MERS, SARS, and Zika — HIV is a case with a notable lack of a successful vaccine, after hundreds of projects attempting to develop one.</p><p>Lo notes that only four of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies are heavily invested in vaccine development, down considerably from two decades ago — despite the fact that vaccines have easily the best odds of becoming successful drugs.</p><p>"This tells me that the economics of vaccines must be really challenging, if fewer and fewer big pharma companies are willing to commit resources to this business," Lo says. "If there's a silver lining to this terrible pandemic, it's that things are going to change in the aftermath of Covid-19."</p>
<h3>Why an "insurance" drug may be less profitable</h3><p>Indeed, Lo suggests, the specific economic challenge is that vaccines are the equivalent of "insurance," among medicines: We apply them to limit the cost of disasters, but do not always think to invest in them in advance. Many governments may not have perceived a need to develop and stockpile vaccines, thereby reducing the demand for vaccine research and making it less rewarding for private industry.</p><p>"Vaccines used to be [more] profitable," Lo says. "But over the course of the last 15-20 years, I think governments have started cutting budgets and ignoring issues that aren't clear and present dangers, perhaps expecting private insurers to pick up the slack. Unless there's an immediate threat to public health, it's really hard to get people to focus on it. It's like insurance … You don't think you're going to need it, until you do. And then it's usually too late."</p><p>That fiscal austerity may also have been combined with historical complacency, as past successes against smallpox, polio, and other diseases created a perception that terrible pandemics were a thing of the past.</p>
<p>In any case, Lo says, the data paints a clear picture: Vaccine research is both promising and underfunded.</p><p>"The reason we wrote this paper is to bring more awareness to this situation," Lo says. "Now that we've experienced the deadly consequences of a pandemic, the hope is that governments around the world — and it really has to be governments — will pay more attention."</p><p>Lo adds: "As the saying goes, 'crisis is a terrible thing to waste,' so we need to take advantage of this opportunity to come up with a more enduring solution, not just for this pandemic, but for all future pandemics, because inevitably another pandemic will emerge, whether its SARS, MERS, or some other pathogen we've never encountered. Thanks to a number of recent biomedical breakthroughs, we now have many more ways of creating anti-infectives than ever before — we just need the political will to do so."</p><p>The study drew upon research support from the MIT Laboratory for Financial Engineering and funding from The Rockefeller Foundation. Lo also helped found a consulting firm that analyzes drug development data.</p><p>Reprinted with permission of <a href="http://news.mit.edu/" target="_blank">MIT News</a>. Read the <a href="http://news.mit.edu/2020/how-often-vaccine-trials-succeed-0527" target="_blank">original article</a>.</p>
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Women who go to church have more kids—and more help
Want help raising your kids? Spend more time at church, says new study.
06 July, 2020
Pixabay
Culture & Religion
- Religious people tend to have more children than secular people, but why remains unknown.
- A new study suggests that the social circles provided by regular church going make raising kids easier.
- Conversely, having a large secular social group made women less likely to have children.
<p>When you think about it, religious ritual is kind of strange. People invest time, energy, and resources into pageantry that doesn't appear to produce any immediate return on investment. From an evolutionary standpoint, this doesn't make a ton of sense—we might expect cultures with elaborate, energy-intensive rituals to be less successful than their neighbors who invest their resources elsewhere. </p><p>However, we see religious rituals of various kinds all around the world and across history. Examples can be found in the most enduring empires and the smallest territories. We know of the rituals in both the most impressive cultures and those that merely passed by on the world's stage. The constant presence of religious ceremonies in our history suggests that there is some functionality that more than justifies the upfront costs. Precisely what this functionality is and how it works is increasingly the focus of many studies in the social sciences. </p><p>One such <a href="https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2019.0428#d403693e1" target="_blank">study</a>, published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, suggests that the social bonds formed by religious communities provide support that differs from those of secular communities and allows women to have more children without the typical costs of a larger <a href="https://phys.org/news/2020-07-links-religion-parental-non-family-members.html" target="_blank">family</a>. </p>
Be fruitful and multiply
<p>Scientists in the United Kingdom collected data on more than 13,000 mothers and their children. Most of them were religious, but 12 percent were not. The data included information on their church habits, social networks, number of children, and the scores those children achieved on a standardized test.</p><p>In line with previous findings that religious women have more children than secular women in industrialized countries, a connection between at least monthly church attendance and fertility was confirmed. However, religious parents showed they could avoid the pitfalls that having more children can bring. </p><p>Typically, more children in a family leads to reduced cognitive ability and height in each <a href="https://academic.oup.com/ije/article/37/6/1408/729795" target="_blank">child</a>. Some studies find that children do less well in school for each <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13524-016-0471-0" target="_blank">additional sibling they have</a>. This makes a kind of intuitive sense, as parents with more children would have to divide their time, energy, and resources among more people as families expand. One would expect that the larger families would also lead to things like lower test scores. </p><p>Despite the expectation, the children of religious parents didn't have lower scores on standardized tests. There were small positive relationships between the size of the mother's social network, the number of co-religionists helping out, and the children's test scores. However, this association was small, didn't show up in all of the testings, and was unrelated to other variables. </p> These effects might be explained by the size and helpfulness of the social networks around the more religious. Women who went to church at least once a month had more extensive social networks than those who never go or who attend yearly. These social networks of co-religious people mean that there are more people to turn to for help with child-rearing, a point also demonstrated in the data. The amount of aid women got from their fellow churchgoers was also associated with a higher fertility rate. <br> <br> Conversely, an extensive social network was associated with fewer children for secular women. This finding is in line with <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1207/s15327957pspr0904_5" target="_blank">previous studies</a> and suggests that the social networks comprised of co-religious individuals differ from those found elsewhere.So, how quickly should I join a local religious group?
<div class="rm-shortcode" data-media_id="6RrmYM8M" data-player_id="FvQKszTI" data-rm-shortcode-id="9eb4740a7d1e10108a75fd2ed627a90f"> <div id="botr_6RrmYM8M_FvQKszTI_div" class="jwplayer-media" data-jwplayer-video-src="https://content.jwplatform.com/players/6RrmYM8M-FvQKszTI.js"> <img src="https://cdn.jwplayer.com/thumbs/6RrmYM8M-1920.jpg" class="jwplayer-media-preview" /> </div> <script src="https://content.jwplatform.com/players/6RrmYM8M-FvQKszTI.js"></script> </div> <p>The study is not without its faults, and more investigations into the relationship between fertility, childcare, ritual, and social networks are needed.</p><p>These findings all show correlation, not causation. Though it might be said the results point towards causation, various alternative interpretations of the data are apparent. The authors note that most religions are explicitly pro-natal. It is possible that religious women have internalized these values and simply choose to have more children than secular women do.</p><p>This idea is similar to a potential interpretation of why large social networks have the opposite effect for secular women. The authors suggest that, in some cases, these more extensive social networks are associated with work and exert an anti-natal influence. Again, the people who build such networks may be people unlikely to have large families under any circumstances.</p><p>However, the researchers' hypothesis endured. The help religious women get from their church-based social networks allows them to have larger families than those who lack these support systems. In some instances, these support systems also prevent the adverse effects of larger families. </p>The community religion offers
<p>As we've mentioned <a href="https://bigthink.com/culture-religion/what-is-secular-humanism" target="_blank">before</a>, religion offers a community, and a community provides social capital. As religion continues to decline in the West, the social bonds of faith communities that used to tie social communities together begin to decay. However, as has been noted by a variety of observers for the last few decades, fewer and fewer new organizations appear ready to replace religion as a source of community in our lives.</p><p>While many different organizations might offer social support that religion once provided the whole of western society, this study shows that different social circles can differently affect the people in them. This finding must be considered by those trying to find new communities to join or the authors of future research. </p><p>The community offered by religious groups provides real benefits to those who join them. As this study shows, having the support network religious community offers allows some parents to avoid pitfalls that bedevil those lacking similar support. It suggests that previous studies demonstrating that group ritual offers benefits like increased amounts of <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797612472910" target="_blank">group trust</a> and <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1069397103037002003" target="_blank">cooperation</a> are onto something and that those benefits have a variety of applications. </p><p>While this study is not without its blind spots, it offers a strong starting point for further investigations into the nature of ritual in our modern lives and how local support networks remain vital in our increasingly globalized world. </p>
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Leonardo da Vinci could visually flip between dimensions, neuroscientist claims
A neuroscientist argues that da Vinci shared a disorder with Picasso and Rembrandt.
26 October, 2018
Christopher Tyler
Mind & Brain
- A neuroscientist at the City University of London proposes that Leonardo da Vinci may have had exotropia, allowing him to see the world with impaired depth perception.
- If true, it means that Da Vinci would have been able to see the images he wanted to paint as they would have appeared on a flat surface.
- The finding reminds us that sometimes looking at the world in a different way can have fantastic results.
<p><a href="https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaophthalmology/article-abstract/2707245" target="_blank">An analysis</a> of Renaissance artwork suggests that Leonardo Da Vinci may have had <a href="https://aapos.org/terms/conditions/49" target="_blank">exotropia</a>, a kind of strabismus which causes one of the eyes to be turned outwards, and that the condition may have helped him as a painter by allowing him to switch between three-dimensional and two-dimensional <a href="https://www.sciencenews.org/article/eye-disorder-exotropia-leonardo-da-vinci-artistic-edge" target="_blank">vision</a>. He wouldn't have been alone, other famous painters who are speculated to have had the condition include <a href="https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM200409163511224" target="_blank">Rembrandt </a>and <a href="http://sites.bu.edu/ombs/2012/02/21/inside-the-mind-of-creative-geniuses/" target="_blank">Picasso</a>.</p>
The study
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8xODc3Mjc2NS9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY1MTA4MDg2NH0.T-98YvLjS9mUCQkgqHyV43Q7h_JIiubrev-Fp_0j4Pg/img.jpg?width=1245&coordinates=0%2C38%2C0%2C579&height=700" id="58346" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="674799ba34e115a2e9a3e94c366bfc26" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />The Virtuvian Man. Christopher Tyler suggests that Da Vinci used his own image as a template for the face in the drawing.
Vitruvian Man, by Leonardo da Vinci created c. 1480–1490
<p><a href="https://www.city.ac.uk/people/academics/christopher-tyler" target="_blank">Professor Christopher Tyler</a> of the City University of London's optometry division analyzed six pieces of Renaissance art by or held to be images of Da Vinci, including the famous <em>Vitruvian Man. </em>By looking at the paintings, drawings, and statues and applying the same techniques optometrists use on patients, Tyler was able to conclude that the eyes of the men depicted were misaligned.</p><p> He concluded that, if the images he analyzed were truly reflective of how Da Vinci looked, that the great artist had a mild case of exotropia. </p>How would this have helped him paint?
<span style="display:block;position:relative;padding-top:56.25%;" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="b221010aa7688734d4d6a41f0df5933f"><iframe type="lazy-iframe" data-runner-src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/j6F-sHhmfrY?rel=0" width="100%" height="auto" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;"></iframe></span><p><a href="https://shileyeye.ucsd.edu/faculty/shira-robbins" target="_blank">Shira Robbins</a>, a professor of ophthalmology at the University of California at San Diego, who was not involved with the project, explained to <em><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/10/19/leonardo-da-vincis-genius-may-be-rooted-in-a-common-eye-disorder-new-study-says/?utm_term=.d3f44ed91c16" target="_blank">The Washington Post</a> </em>how individuals with exotropia often turn to additional information to help understand the world around them:</p><blockquote>"What happens in some people is when they're only using one eye . . . they develop other cues besides traditional depth perception to understand where things are in space, looking at color and shadow in a way that most of us who use both eyes at a time don't really appreciate." </blockquote><p>Dr. Robbins agrees that, if the artworks analyzed accurately depict Da Vinci, then he probably had exotropia.</p><p>If Da Vinci did have a mild form of the condition, which would allow him to focus with both eyes when concentrating and with one when relaxed, Tyler asserts that the famed artist could have viewed the world in two or three dimensions at will, showing him the world exactly as he would need to recreate it on a flat surface. Quite the superpower for an artist.</p>Does this mean Da Vinci would have been a hack if he had normal eyesight?
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8xODc3MjY5NS9vcmlnaW4ucG5nIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYyMjYwOTgxOH0.eSu3YBpCuaDj59-4lzSeZ1WgwtV2ETGiWHqczzW3how/img.png?width=980" id="9c323" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="edd4e9e9d9c1156a53242df6288d7cc0" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />Christopher Tyler
A graph showing the difference in where each eye is focused for each painting, drawing, and statue used in the study. The larger the difference, the more pronounced the exotropia is in the image.
<p>Not at all. What Dr. Tyler is suggesting is that the tendency of people who have exotropia to rely on using one eye to see the world and thereby lose some depth perception allowed Da Vinci to understand better how the three-dimensional objects in the world could be translated into a two-dimensional image on a canvas. This could account for some of Da Vinci's skill in depicting shadow and subtle changes in color, since he would have relied on these details to understand the world. <br><br>His polymathic brilliance extended far beyond art, and nobody is claiming that his ideas for flying machines, tanks, or <a href="http://www.da-vinci-inventions.com/davinci-inventions.aspx" target="_blank">other inventions </a>were at all influenced by a vision problem.</p>How can we know this? He has been dead for five hundred years.
<span style="display:block;position:relative;padding-top:56.25%;" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="c26fc51b0aebbcd6905593015fec79e5"><iframe type="lazy-iframe" data-runner-src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/LRAptNtN9-A?rel=0" width="100%" height="auto" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;"></iframe></span><p>There are reasons to be cautious anytime we make claims about people who are long dead. In this case, we have the bonus problem that we aren't 100 percent sure that the images used are supposed to look like Da Vinci. </p><p> That is the major caveat of the idea; all of the images used as evidence of his condition are assumed to look like him. While some of the images, like the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_(Verrocchio)" target="_blank"><em>David</em> by Andrea del Verrocchio</a>, are generally agreed to be based on Leonardo the other pictures are claimed to be reflective of him based only on his statement that "[The soul] guides the painter's arm and makes him reproduce himself, since it appears to the soul that this is the best way to represent a human being." </p><p>Tyler also argues that the portraits he claims are based on Da Vinci share similarities with the images generally accepted to be portraits of him; including similar hair and facial features. This lends weight to the idea that the artist incorporated his own traits into his artwork, including his vision problem. </p><p>Leonardo da Vinci was undoubtedly one of the greatest geniuses of all time. If he had exotropia, then it was merely a minor addition to his artistic skills. It does, however, give us a literal example of how people who look at the world differently can use that vantage point to their advantage to create things we all can appreciate. </p>
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Bubonic plague case reported in China
Health officials in China reported that a man was infected with bubonic plague, the infectious disease that caused the Black Death.
06 July, 2020
(Photo by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention/Getty Images)
Coronavirus
- The case was reported in the city of Bayannur, which has issued a level-three plague prevention warning.
- Modern antibiotics can effectively treat bubonic plague, which spreads mainly by fleas.
- Chinese health officials are also monitoring a newly discovered type of swine flu that has the potential to develop into a pandemic virus.
<p>A man in China's inner Mongolia region was infected with bubonic plague, according to health officials.<br></p><p>The infection occurred in the city of Bayannur, located northwest of Beijing. City officials declared a citywide Level 3 plague-prevention warning, the second lowest in a four-tier system, and said it'll remain in place for the rest of the year. The warning advises people against hunting, eating, or handling infected animals, particularly marmots. </p><p style="margin-left: 20px;">"At present, there is a risk of a human plague epidemic spreading in this city," the local health authority said, according to state-run newspaper <a href="https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202007/05/WS5f01d743a310834817257493.html" target="_blank">China Daily</a>. "The public should improve its self-protection awareness and ability, and report abnormal health conditions promptly."</p><p>Bubonic plague is the same infectious disease that caused the Black Death, which killed more than 50 million people in the 14th century. The infection is mainly spread by fleas that bite infected animals. When infected fleas bite humans, the bacterial infection spreads through <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lymphatic_vessels" target="_blank">lymphatic vessels</a> to a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lymph_node" target="_blank">lymph node</a>, which can cause swelling, high fevers, delirium, and death. Left untreated, the infected can spread to the lungs, where it can become the pneumonic plague, a more severe form of the disease that's always fatal without intervention.</p>
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMzQzNzczMi9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYwOTUyNjM4N30.Qjg2xVonJBFHuhpYF5NCCi3qMkyEIp99nSNwyrYECbc/img.jpg?width=980" id="dd674" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="6a2268f86df7681714997e7f9614d24e" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" alt="Bacteria under microscope" />
Bacteria under microscope
needpix.com
<p>Today, bubonic plague can be treated effectively with antibiotics.</p><p style="margin-left: 20px;">"Unlike in the 14th century, we now have an understanding of how this disease is transmitted," Dr. Shanthi Kappagoda, an infectious disease physician at Stanford Health Care, told <a href="https://www.healthline.com/health-news/seriously-dont-worry-about-the-plague#Heres-how-the-plague-spreads" target="_blank">Healthline</a>. "We know how to prevent it — avoid handling sick or dead animals in areas where there is transmission. We are also able to treat patients who are infected with effective antibiotics, and can give antibiotics to people who may have been exposed to the bacteria [and] prevent them [from] getting sick."</p><img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMzQzNzcyNi9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYyMTA3NDA1N30.StuNFGBb6mxX8v0wmpaQG5OEtK9JHtEVFx6IC6iXIYo/img.jpg?width=980" id="282ed" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="5241a3e2157ff20e0df0d0a4a04d8ae2" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" alt="Bubonic plague symptoms" />
This plague patient is displaying a swollen, ruptured inguinal lymph node, or buboe.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
<p>Still, hundreds of people develop bubonic plague every year. In the U.S., a handful of cases occur annually, particularly in New Mexico, Arizona and Colorado, <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/plague/faq/index.html" target="_blank">where habitats allow the bacteria to spread more easily among wild rodent populations</a>. But these cases are very rare, mainly because you need to be in close contact with rodents in order to get infected. And though plague can spread from human to human, this <a href="https://www.healthline.com/health-news/seriously-dont-worry-about-the-plague#Heres-how-the-plague-spreads" target="_blank">only occurs with pneumonic plague</a>, and transmission is also rare.</p>A new swine flu in China
<p>Last week, researchers in China also reported another public health concern: a new virus that has "all the essential hallmarks" of a pandemic virus.<br></p><p>In a paper published in the <a href="https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/06/23/1921186117" target="_blank">Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences</a>, researchers say the virus was discovered in pigs in China, and it descended from the H1N1 virus, commonly called "swine flu." That virus was able to transmit from human to human, and it killed an estimated 151,700 to 575,400 people worldwide from 2009 to 2010, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.</p>There's no evidence showing that the new virus can spread from person to person. But the researchers did find that 10 percent of swine workers had been infected by the virus, called G4 reassortant EA H1N1. This level of infectivity raises concerns, because it "greatly enhances the opportunity for virus adaptation in humans and raises concerns for the possible generation of pandemic viruses," the researchers wrote.
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