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Universal Vaccines – The Lowdown

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An interesting news item on 'universal' vaccines appeared last week in the BBC News Health Section....  As someone with an active interest in vaccine development, the report 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 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 approach to vaccination would be viable in humans. Acquiring and maintai...
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UK Student Loans – SB or BS ?

UK Student loans, and more particularly the repayment of them, is a hot topic in the news at the moment.  The student body, both past and present, are all clamouring for more favourable terms, given Reeves' recent threshold freeze, the burgeoning cost of living, and progressive rises in student fees. There are particular concerns about the affordability of the legacy (i.e. Plan 2) scheme which still applies to all loans taken out between September 2012 and August 2023. The majority of outstanding loan balances currently fall under this plan (5.8 million loans taken out under the scheme in total), and the terms of this scheme has resulted in crippling interest rates due to the built-in 3% surcharge above RPI for anyone earning over £50k. The prolonged threshold freeze will also ensure that virtually everone will end up paying off both the loan and the interest, unless they are permanently on benefits. The recent and quite prolonged spike in inflation, which resulted in interest ...
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File Sharing via the internet - Is there a Pain-Free Way ?

  Many of us who still use a pc will, sooner or later, find they need to share larger files  with others. If these are  more than ca 10MB in size, this can present problems. The traditional, and probably still the most widely used, method of transferring smaller files to someone else is via an email attachment. This has two associated problems…the first (and perhaps best known because of the trouble it can cause) is that all mail systems prohibit attachments above a certain size, and this limit can be as little as 5 MB or even less. Even a medium-sized Word document with illustrations or images within it can easily exceed this limit, and audio and video files will almost always be above it, unless they are very short.   This results in 'offending' mail messages being rejected and not reaching their destination, something which is not always apparent to the sender.  The other, and less widely appreciated, issue is that emails are eminently ‘hackable’ (see r...
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Windows 7 to Windows 10/11: To Upgrade or Not to Upgrade ?

  Microsoft (MS) withdrew support for Windows 7 way back in 2014 in line with their general policy of planned version obsolescence. By all accounts, there are still a considerable number of older pcs running Win 7; their owners have either simply not been able to afford the cost of an upgrade, or have heard of the obstacles to upgrading, and are quite reasonably reluctant to risk trying to upgrade an older pc with a new OS that it may not be able to cope with. For anyone actually brave enough to try upgrading a Win 7 pc,   MS have thrown an additional spanner in the works by no longer offering   downloads for Win 10 or Win 11 installation on pcs they detect are still running Windows 7 or XP. Users are therefore effectively   prevented by MS from using either of the more recent OS versions......the very versions that MS were originally prepared to let you upgrade to for free. This is an obvious ploy to force users to replace their old (but still serviceable) pcs wi...
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