He was right

Leonardo da Vinci was right all along, new medical scans show

Leonardo da Vinci's anatomical drawings were "startling" in their accuracy, new medical scans have shown, putting him hundreds of years ahead of his peers.

He has long been praised as one of the finest artists of the Renaissance, working far ahead of his time and producing some of the world’s most recognisable works.

But Leonardo da Vinci has finally received the credit he deserves for his “startling” medical accuracy hundreds of years in advance of his peers, as scientists match his anatomical drawings with modern day MRI scans.

The project, which will be unveiled at the Edinburgh International Festival in August, compares the work directly for the very first time, unveiling the minute details recorded by the artist.

In a series of 30 pictures, the Royal Collection Trust will show da Vinci’s distinctive anatomical drawings alongside a newly-taken MRI or CT scan.

The comparison is intended to show just how accurate da Vinci was, despite his limited technology and lack of contemporary medical knowledge.

^{The bones, muscles and tendons of the hand and muscles and tendons of the lower leg and foot, c.1510-11}

The drawings, which were hundreds of years ahead of their time in some areas, remained among the artist’s personal papers when he died, effectively “lost” for several hundred years.

Had they been published at the time, the exhibition curators believe, they would have “formed the most influential work on the human body ever produced”.

Five hundred years on, comparisons with CT and MRI scans show that Leonardo’s work is still relevant to scientists today.

Martin Clayton, exhibition curator, said the project was intended to examine the medical relevance of da Vinci’s “astonishing” drawings for the first time.

Speaking at the launch of the Edinburgh International Festival, he admitted it had been a “voyage into the unknown”, which could have led to the conclusion da Vinci’s work was simply of historic curiosity, irrelevant to modern day anatomists”.

Instead, he revealed, doctors found the detailed drawings were “startling” in their accuracy.

The pictures, largely produced in the winter of 1510- 1511 when da Vinci completed around 20 dissections, show the muscles, bones and sinews of the human body.

One, of the heart, comes “agonisingly close” to showing how the pump action worked, with the movement of blood remarkably similar to that in a modern day medical video.

^{The muscles of the shoulder, arm and neck and The aortic valve}

The artist also produced the first accurate depiction of the spine, as well as drawing a child in the womb in the correct position.

The Leonardo da Vinci: The Mechanics of Man exhibition, part of the festival showing the influence of technology on art, will open at The Queen’s Gallery, Palace of Holyroodhouse, in August.

It will be based on da Vinci’s ‘Anatomical Manuscript A’, on which he crammed more than 240 individual drawings and notes running to more than 13,000 words in his distinctive mirror-writing.

It has never before been displayed in its entirety in the UK.

Mr Clayton said: “Royal Collection Trust’s association with the Edinburgh International Festival, in a year when its programme focuses on the theme of technology, has prompted us to examine the modern relevance of Leonardo’s astonishing drawings.

For the first time we will be displaying the artist’s works alongside stunning examples of medical imaging, showing how the concerns and methods of the world’s leading anatomists have changed little in 500 years, and how truly groundbreaking Leonardo’s investigations were.

Jonathan Mills, director of the Edinburgh International Festival, said: “In a year when the Edinburgh International Festival is focusing on the myriad of ways in which technology seizes and shifts the imaginations of artists, there is no better example of that than the genius of Leonardo da Vinci and his sophisticated and poetic understanding of the human condition.”

Leonardo da Vinci was an adept.

Do not believe the lies

Welfare reform, my arse. 

Has Jim Royle parked his chair, feet up, telly on, in the corridors between the Treasury and the Department for Work and Pensions? 

Employing him as adviser can be the only explanation for the utter rubbish that boils forth from this government on welfare.

Who else could have dreamed up the bedroom tax, a policy so stupid it forces people to leave their homes and drag themselves around the country in search of nonexistent one-bedroom flats?

That one has to be the result of too many hours in front of Jeremy Kyle (no offence) with the heating on full and a can of super-strength lager. It seems as if that is how this government views ordinary people: feckless and useless – poor, because they brought it on themselves, deliberately.

Maybe the cabinet is confused. 

Twenty-three millionaires in the one room can get like that. 

But do you know what, enough. 

Let's call this government's welfare policy what it is – wrong, nasty and dishonest.

Off the top of my head, I can list 10 porkies they are spinning to justify the latest stage of their attack on our 70-year-old welfare state.

1. Benefits are too generous

Really? Could you live on £53 a week as Iain Duncan Smith is claiming he could if he had to? 

Then imagine handing back 14% of this because the government deems you have a "spare room". 

Could you find the money to pay towards council tax and still afford to eat at the end of the week?

2. Benefits are going up

They're not. A 1% "uprating" cap is really a cut. Inflation is at least 2.7% . 

Essentials like food, fuel and transport are all up by at least that, in many cases far more. 

Benefits are quickly falling behind the cost of living.

3. Jobs are out there, if people look

Where? 

Unemployment rose last month and is at 2.5 million, with one million youngsters out of work. 

When Costa Coffee advertised eight jobs, 1,701 applied.

4. The bedroom tax won't hit army families or foster carers

Yes it will. 

Perhaps most cruel of all, the tax will not apply to foster families who look after one kid. 

If you foster siblings, then tough. 

But these kids are often the hardest to place. 

Thanks to George Osborne and IDS, their chances just got worse. 

And even if your son or daughter is in barracks in Afghanistan, then don't expect peace of mind as the government still has to come clean on plans for their bedroom.

5. Social tenants can downsize

Really, where? 

Councils sold their properties – and Osborne wants them to sell what's left. 

Housing associations built for families. 

In Hull, there are 5,500 people told to chase 70 one-bedroom properties.

6. Housing benefit is the problem

In fact it's rental costs. 

Private rents shot up by an average of £300 last year. 

No wonder 5 million people need housing benefits, but they don't keep a penny. It all goes to landlords. 

7. Claimants are pulling a fast one

No. Less than 1% of the welfare budget is lost to fraud. 

But tax avoidance and evasion is estimated to run to £120bn.

8. It's those teenage single mums

An easy target. Yet only 2% of single mums are teenagers. 

And most single mums, at least 59%, work.

9. We're doing this for the next generation

No you're not. 

The government's admitted at least 200,000 more children will be pushed deeper into poverty because of the welfare changes.

10. Welfare reforms are just about benefit cuts

Wrong. 

The attack on our welfare state is hitting a whole range of services – privatising the NHS, winding up legal aid for people in debt and closing SureStart centres and libraries. 

All this will make life poorer for every community.

Some call these myths. 

I call them lies. 

We are being told lies about who caused this crisis and lied to about the best way out of it. 

But I know one thing to be true: this government's polices will make millions of people poorer and more afraid. 

To do that when you do not have to, when there are other options, is obscene. 

That's why I'm backing union Unite'sOurWelfareWorks campaign in its efforts to help highlight the truth about our welfare state.

Ricky Tomlinson

Sad, sorry, frightened Britain

Here’s one of the big ideas we need to fight the power of the elite.

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Most of the world’s people are decent, honest and kind. 

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Most of those who dominate us are inveterate bastards. 

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This is the conclusion I’ve reached after many years of journalism. 

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Writing on Black Monday, as the British government’s full-spectrum attack on the lives of the poor commences, the thought keeps returning to me.

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“With a most inhuman cruelty, they who have put out the people’s eyes reproach them of their blindness”. 

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This government, whose mismanagement of the economy has forced so many into the arms of the state, blames the sick, the unemployed, the underpaid for a crisis caused by the feral elite, and punishes them accordingly. 

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Most of those affected by the bedroom tax, introduced today, are disabled. 

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Many thousands will be driven from their homes, many more pushed towards destitution. 

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Relief for the poor from council tax will be clipped; legal aid for civil cases cut off. 

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Yet, at the end of this week, those taking more than £150,000 a year will have their income tax cut.

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Two days later, benefit payments for the poorest will be cut in real terms. 

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A week after that, thousands of families who live in towns and boroughs where property prices are high will be forced out of their homes by the total benefits cap. 

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What we are witnessing is raw economic warfare by the rich against the poor.

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So the age-old question comes knocking: why does the decent majority allow itself to be governed by a brutal, antisocial minority? 

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Part of the reason is that the minority controls the story. 

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As John Harris explains in the Guardian, large numbers (including many who depend on it) have been persuaded that most recipients of social security are feckless, profligate fraudsters. 

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Despite everything that has happened over the past two years, Rupert Murdoch, Lord 

Rothermere and the other media barons still seem to be running the country. 

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Their relentless propaganda, using exceptional and shocking cases to characterise an entire social class, remains highly effective. 

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Divide and rule is as potent as it has ever been.

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But I’ve come to believe that there’s also something deeper at work: that most of the world’s people live with the legacy of slavery. 

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Even in a nominal democracy like the United Kingdom, most people were more or less in bondage until little more than a century ago: on near-starvation wages, fired at will, threatened with extreme punishment if they dissented, forbidden to vote. 

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They lived in great and justified fear of authority, and the fear has persisted: passed down across the five or six generations that separate us, and reinforced now by renewed insecurity, snowballing inequality, partisan policing.

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Any movement which seeks to challenge the power of the elite needs to ask itself what it takes to shake people out of this state. 

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And the answer seems inescapable: hope. 

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Those who govern on behalf of billionaires are threatened only when confronted by the power of a transformative idea.

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A century and more ago the idea was communism.
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Even in the form in which Marx and Engels presented it, its problems are evident: the simplistic binary system into which they tried to force society; their brutal dismissal of anyone who did not fit this dialectic (“social scum”, “bribed tool[s] of reactionary intrigue”); their reinvention of Plato’s guardian-philosophers, who would “represent and take care of the future” of the proletariat; the unprecedented power over human life they granted to the state; the millenarian myth of a final resolution to the struggle for power. 

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But their promise of another world electrified people who had, until then, believed that there was no alternative.

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Seventy years ago, in the United Kingdom, the transformative idea was freedom from want and fear through the creation of a social security system and a National Health Service. 

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It swept a Labour government to power which was able, despite far tougher economic circumstances than today’s, to create a fair society from a smashed, divided nation. 

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This is the achievement which – through a series of sudden, spectacular and unmandated strikes – Cameron’s government is now demolishing.

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So where do we look for the idea that can make hope more powerful than fear? 

Not to the Labour party. 

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Ed Miliband cannot bring himself even to oppose a bill which retrospectively denies compensation to cheated jobseekers, the most we can expect from him is a low-alcohol conservatism of the kind that doused all aspiration under Tony Blair.

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Last week I ran a small online poll, asking people to nominate inspiring, transfiguring ideas. 

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The two mentioned most often were land value taxation and a basic income. 

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As it happens, both are championed by the Green Party. 

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On this and other measures, its policies are by a long way more progressive than Labour’s.

I discussed land value taxation in a recent column. 

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A basic income (also known as a citizen’s income) gives everyone, rich and poor, without means testing or conditions, a guaranteed sum every week. 

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It replaces some but not all benefits (there would, for example, be extra payments for pensioners and people with disabilities). 

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It banishes the fear and insecurity now stalking the poorer half of the population. 

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Economic survival becomes a right, not a privilege.

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A basic income removes the stigma of benefits while also breaking open what politicians call the welfare trap: because taking work would not reduce your entitlement to social security, there would be no disincentive to find a job: all the money you earn is extra income. 

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The poor are not forced by desperation into the arms of unscrupulous employers: people will work if conditions are good and pay fair, but will refuse to be treated like mules. 

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It redresses the wild imbalance in bargaining power that the current system exacerbates. 

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It could do more than any other measure to dislodge the emotional legacy of serfdom. 

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It would be financed by progressive taxation: in fact it meshes well with land value tax.

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These ideas require courage: the courage to confront the government, the opposition, the plutocrats, the media, the suspicions of a wary electorate. 

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But without proposals on this scale, progressive politics is dead. 

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They strike that precious spark, so seldom kindled in this age of triangulation and timidity: the spark of hope.

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George Monbiot

On babying children

British children 'babied' by intrusive parents, says MP

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Conservative MP Claire Perry criticised parents for filling children's lives with too many organised activities, 

Parents were also failing to lay down the law and set "limits", she said.

Campaigners said politicians should stop "telling us how to be better parents" and focus on childcare policy.

Mrs Perry, who is the PM's adviser on the commercialisation and sexualisation of childhood, said over-parenting was stifling children's ability to fend for themselves.

We've created a treadmill, it's usually the mother that is orchestrating all of that and doing all the driving," she said.

We worship this feminine motherhood thing and I don't think our children have benefited actually. 

They're babied a lot.

The mother of three, who took a seven-year break from her career in management consulting to look after her young children, explained mothers often became part of the problem because their own work-life balance struggled when starting a family.

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A lot of it is women who, because it is difficult to get on, subjugate their own ambition into their kids," she said.

That makes it harder when they get to university and realise they haven't got a mother to help them with their homework, watching their every move. 

We've all done it.

She added she once tended to "hover" over her children: 

Now, I just can't, so I don't, and I think they're probably better off as a result.

At the same time, Mrs Perry warned children were not being taught about the real dangers in life, especially the internet - which parents did not fully understand.

Good parenting isn't just about making sure they come top in maths, but all the difficult stuff too. 

If they don't learn the limits from us, who will tell them?

Mrs Perry said most parents were too busy or ignorant to realise what their children were doing online.

They are living in a digital oblivion," she said.

Social commentator Frank Furedi, emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Kent said parents were under "enormous pressure" from schools and society to mould their children and oversee their achievements.

They find it difficult to let go and this cultivates a sense of dependency.

He added universities often had to adjust for incoming students "lacking a sense of maturity" with first year lecturers forced "to act like teachers, helping pupils along".

But Mrs Perry's views came under fire from Mumsnet founder Justine Roberts, who insisted parents were "doing their best" and were "knackered most of the time".

She told BBC News: "Mothers are, sadly, used to copping a lot of blame - but being charged with being over-protective, cupcake-baking helicopter parents at the same time as being feckless, couch potatoes who let their children have unfettered internet access is a bit rich.

Mrs Perry said mothers were often the ones creating a "treadmill" for children

Of course there are some 'tiger mum' types who are micromanaging packed improvement schedules for their children... but on Mumsnet certainly, they are far outweighed by others who share Clare Perry's view that unstructured time is really important.

Ms Roberts added: Politicians could more usefully perhaps focus on improving local schools, job prospects, childcare options and flexible work solutions than telling us how to be better parents. Miaow!

Labour MP Frank Field, who advised the coalition government on children's foundation years, also criticised Mrs Perry's comments as "amazing".

He highlighted the "desperate" situation for many disadvantaged children in the UK, urging the MP "not to attack those parents investing heavily in their children, but to find out why the vast majority of young people want to be good parents and yet a very, very, very substantial group of them fail to do so".

However Anna May Mangan, mother of four and author of Getting into Medical School: The Pushy Mother's Guide, told the BBC that being a hands-on parent was important because "our schools don't teach children to be competitive".

She said she had adopted a "praying mantis" style to help her children get into university, adding: "You can't choose for your child, but you can certainly support them when they know what they want to do."

Mrs Perry became the prime minister's adviser on the commercialisation and sexualisation of childhood in December 2012.

Proposals put forward by the Devizes MP include age ratings for sexually provocative music videos, restrictions on access to so-called "lads' mags", labelling on airbrushed photos in magazines and internet safety classes in schools.

Survey lies

Continue reading the main story

Many people are under-reporting how much alcohol they are drinking. 

But what else are we fibbing to researchers about and why do we do it?

I have the occasional sweet sherry. 

Purely medicinal.

It is a classic British sitcom scene. 

An inveterate boozer telling a little white lie about how much they drink to a doctor or other authority figure.

But the tendency to paint a less-than-honest picture about your unhealthy habits and lifestyle is not just restricted to alcohol. 

People also tend to kid themselves about how much exercise they are doing.

It is understandable that people want to present a positive image of themselves to friends, family and colleagues. 

But why fib to researchers?

After all, the man or woman from the Office for National Statistics or Ipsos Mori can't order you to go on a diet or lay off the wine.

It is a question that has been puzzling social scientists for decades.

They even have a name for it - The Social Desirability Bias.

People respond to surveys in the way they think they ought to. 

It is otherwise known as lying," says Kate Fox, an alcohol and drinking culture expert who has done research for both the government and the drinks industry.

The recycling never lies

People also kid themselves about how much they drink, but it applies to most surveys, which is why one has to use other methods to really find out what is going on.

It is a particular problem when it comes to "sins" such as alcohol and food.

Britain is one of a handful of nations - including the US - that has an "ambivalent drinking culture", says Fox. 

It is particularly prevalent in countries that have had a strong temperance movement.

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We have a morally charged relationship with alcohol, a love/hate relationship. 

It is a bit of a forbidden fruit.

In countries with an "integrated drinking culture", such as more Latin nations, drinking is a "morally neutral issue, only marginally more controversial than coffee and tea".

It is easy to see why people would want to make themselves look good - even to a clipboard-wielding researcher they have just met.

But what about when the researcher leaves the room? 

Or hands them a separate questionnaire to be filled in privately? 

They're all tactics used by researchers to try and iron out the Social Desirability Bias.

You still want to project a positive image of yourself even if the survey is anonymous," says Bobby Duffy, managing director of Ipsos Mori's Social Research Institute.

The gap between the amount of alcohol being sold in the UK and the amount people said they were drinking, was first observed in the 1980s, he says.

Continue reading the main story

People have unrealistic expectations about what other people are doing and that does affect how they how they respond.

They think other people are drinking a lot less alcohol, doing more exercise and having a lot more sex and that changes their view of their own behaviour.

The gap between perception and reality might be particularly acute in the UK, he suggests.

Awareness of healthy eating in the UK is among the highest in Europe, yet the country also has the highest obesity rates.

The key, says Duffy, is to view survey results as part of a bigger picture - and, he stresses, it is still possible to track overall social trends from self-reported surveys.

But if people underestimate how much they drink, do they overestimate how often they have sex?

The sex survey has been a surefire way to boost the circulation of a newspaper or magazine for decades.

Yet there is anxiety among sexual researchers that they are not as accurate as they should be.

Surveys can overestimate how often couples have sex

In a large number of these surveys people inflate how often they have sex. 

They are buying into this idea that great sex is measured by how often you have it," says Petra Boynton, senior lecturer in International Health Care Research at University College London.

We do have an anxiety about trusting sex research generally, partly because of worries over talking about sex but recently more because of the misuse of the survey tool as an advertising device.

It is hardly surprising, she says, that journalists and the public don't trust sex research:

What they see shared in mainstream media is not the careful and more balanced work undertaken in social and health research.

As sex stories on relationships advice in media are pinned on 'statistics', then this allows the dodgy PR polls to be used to tell us how we should be having sex and set up ideas about what is normal.