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Universal Vaccines – Reality or Just Another a Pipedream ?

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An interesting news item on 'universal' vaccines appeared in March in the BBC News Health Section.... This was followwed up recently by an article in Science .  As someone with an active interest in vaccine development, these reports certainly attracted my attention, and I think the methodology merits wider discussion as a possible 'game changer' in our approach to preventing human disease…. The concept of a ‘universal’ vaccine has been on the minds of those in the vaccine development field for many years, but the recent announcement is the first suggestion that such an intervention might actually be possible…and effective. I should add straight away that the Stanford research project alluded to in the above linked BBC article is still very much in its early stages, and positive results have only been shown in lab mice to date. The methodology is nowhere near entering human trials yet, and this will be the only way to demonstrate whether a more universal approac...
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Shadow Libraries, AI and the Casual e-Reader – Whither Publishing and Copyright ?

 Blog first published November 2022. Updated April 2023, January 2025, November 2026. Editors note: After a long period when the 'authorities' seemed to be in abeyance on take-downs of the much loved and well-used shadow-libraries, they re-started their war in early 2025 with a vengeance by taking down two of the most popular (Anna's Archive and LibGen), by forcing ISPs to introduce server blockages. I suspect the timing of this was no coincidence, given the imminence of a new US government regime likely to be less favourably inclined towards to this type of industrial censorship, and the frequent 'spats' between the UK Labour government and the new US regime. The war has continued into 2026, with no end in sight despite Trump's anti-censorship stance.  If you're a devotee of the shadow libraries, and haven't yet discovered it, the Shadow Libraries Uptime Monitor ( SLUM ) is very useful in indicating which links to try. You'll need a VPN if in UK , t...
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Did I Lock All The Doors and Windows This Morning ? - An Airport Lament

  How often have you got half way to work,   and found yourself convinced that you left the front door unlocked, or the gas on ?  Or, or worse still, ended up well on the way to your holiday destination with the same sinking feeling ? It’s a more common problem than you might think, and it definitely isn’t confined to the elderly… I call it the ‘Familiarity Breeds Amnesia’ (FBA) syndrome, because it arises from our inability to distinguish between individual occurrences of a familiar action which we perform day in, day out in a virtually identical way. Picture this type of scenario – you’re about to leave your house, and will be double-locking your front door with a conventional latch and possibly also a mortice key. You probably do this at least two or three times every day, and it takes a few seconds at most. It's virtually automatic, but isn’t always registered as a discrete event in your memory. The action, and therefore the memory of it, is difficult to recal...
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