Yellow fever, an acute viral disease, is estimated to have been responsible for 78,000 deaths in Africa in 2013 according to new research published in PLOS Medicine this week. The research by Neil Ferguson from Imperial College London, UK and colleagues from Imperial College, WHO and other institutions also estimates that recent mass vaccination campaigns against yellow fever have led to a 27% decrease in the burden of yellow fever across Africa in 2013.

Most dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago but one dinosaur lineage survived and lives on today – we call these the birds and they rule the skies the way they once ruled land. 

An international team, led by scientists from Oxford University and the Royal Ontario Museum, estimated the body mass of 426 dinosaur species based on the thickness of their leg bones. The team found that dinosaurs showed rapid changes in body size shortly after their origins, around 220 million years ago. 

However, these soon slowed: only the evolutionary line leading to birds continued to change size at this rate, and did so for a further 170 million years, producing new ecological diversity not seen in other dinosaur lineages.

Neutron stars are extraordinarily dense stellar bodies created when massive stars collapse. They host the strongest magnetic fields in the universe -- as much as a billion times more powerful than any man-made electromagnet.

But some neutron stars are much more strongly magnetized than others and no one is sure why.

A paper by McGill University physicists Konstantinos Gourgouliatos and Andrew Cumming
in Physical Review Letters  sheds new light on the expected geometry of the magnetic field in neutron stars and could help scientists measure the mass and radius of these unusual stellar bodies, and thereby gain insights into the physics of matter at extreme densities.

Orlando, Fla. — Scientists have developed the first reversible glue that could be used on the battlefield to treat eye injuries, potentially saving soldiers' vision. The research is being presented at the 2014 Annual Meeting of the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO) this week in Orlando, Fla.

When applied to a wounded eye, the adhesive warms up and becomes sticky, sealing the wound and minimizing further damage while the soldier is transported for treatment. Upon arriving at a hospital, doctors can simply apply cool saline solution to the glue, causing it to revert to its non-adhesive form and be removed with minimal discomfort.

Astronomers have made a measurement of a distant neutron star that is one million times more precise than the previous world's best - and they did it by using...nothing.

The interstellar medium is the 'empty' space between stars and galaxies. It's not really empty, it is made up of sparsely spread charged particles and those can be used as a giant lens. The astronomers did just that, to magnify and look closely at the radio wave emission from a small rotating neutron star.

Result: the highest resolution measurement ever achieved, equivalent to being able to see the double-helix structure of our genes from the Moon.

A new congressionally mandated report from the National Research Council has found that changes EPA has proposed and implemented into its Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) process are "substantial improvements"  over its old system.

IRIS is used to assess the hazards posed by environmental contaminants but has been rather sporadically followed in the past. A court had to order the EPA to stop blaming fracking for problems without doing a study and the agency has had to defend itself against charges of 'secret' science in determining greenhouse gas policy.

While acknowledging the progress made to date, the report offers further guidance and recommendations to improve the overall scientific and technical validity of the program.

You can't open a newspaper without reading about how many people are on welfare in America now. The government is even on a recruitment drive to get more people on benefits, and looking for ways to get them buying organic food too.

That shows a whole lot more money is helping better-off families rather than the very poorest.

Robert A. Moffitt, Professor of Economics at the Johns Hopkins University, notes that the United States is spending 74 percent more in inflation-adjusted dollars on welfare programs in 2007 than in 1975 but the 2.5 million single parent families with the absolute lowest levels of earnings, aid dropped 35 percent between 1983 and 2004. During that same period, aid rose 74 percent for those earning slightly more.