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On Monday, legal team of Maureen McDonnell, wife of the former governor of Virginia Bob McDonnell, said in a court filing that the former Virginia first lady's convictions on public corruption charges are based on overly broad definition of bribery. The team also said that Maureen wasn't given a fair trial owing to mistakes.

The court filing is of about 101 pages, which has been filed in the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals. According to McDonnell's attorneys, court should overturn McDonnell's conviction or she should be given another trial. In September last year, Governor of Virginia Bob McDonnell and his wife Maureen McDonnell were convicted in a joint trial.

On Monday, the US Department of Agriculture has confirmed a highly infectious and deadly bird flu virus in a farm in Iowa. Now, up to 5.3 million hens at the farm in northwest Iowa's Osceola County have to be destroyed.

The news is significant as the farm has around 10% of the state's egg-laying hens. Iowa is said to be home to around 59 million hens that lay nearly one in every five eggs consumed in the country. For now, the impact on egg prices cannot be known, but there are less chances that any spike or shortage will come.

Number of chickens that will be culled is a little more than 1% of the nation's egg layers. Simon Shane from North Carolina State University said that if 20 million to 30 million hens are infected then consumers can see a rise in price.

A new study has suggested that antibiotics may be overused in a number of neonatal intensive care units. Researchers of the study found how overused these medications were varied widely. According to reports, some neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) gave antibiotics to infants at a rate about 40 times greater than other NICUs.

Dr. Clay Jones, a pediatrician specializing in newborns at Newton-Wellesley Hospital in Massachusetts, said, "The results of this study aren't surprising. We have reams of data showing that antibiotics are overused in multiple other settings. The most striking finding is the degree of variance in the use of antibiotics between facilities". Jones was not part of the study.

Medical Marijuana has been legalized in Washington D. C. and 23 other states. National Institute on Drug Abuse has also listed cannabis as a useful drug for medical purposes.

Although the Drug Enforcement Agency has categorized marijuana as a schedule I drug. The schedule I classification means that it's tough for researchers to get their hands on pot grown to the exacting standards that are required for medical research, even in states where it's legal.

Also, no researcher can even try to make an FDA-approved cannabis product while it has that DEA classification.

A majority of Americans also believe that the medical pot should be legal since the late 1990s and many are currently supporting the recreational legalization of the drug.

Novartis AG, one of the world's leading cancer R&D companies, has shifted its focus on using the body's immune system to battle tumors. As many as 22 oncology drugs from Novartis are currently available in the market to treat cancers, ranging from breast cancer to leukemia. The company is also developing 25 other treatments for cancer.

A research group having expertise in the field of immuno-oncology has been recently launched by the drug manufacturer. The Swiss company has hired an internationally known cancer vaccine authority, Dr. Glenn Dranoff, to lead the group. The aim is to focus on three distinct therapeutic areas and figure out how they can be combined with existing cancer drugs.

A new discovery could provide help treat multiple sclerosis (MS). According to reports, two drugs that are used in skin cream to treat athlete's foot and eczema could also be used to reverse multiple sclerosis. The discovery could now lead to some ground-breaking therapies for the disease which affects more than 20,000 individual in Australia.

According to researchers, they found that the two drugs, the anti-fungal agent miconazole and the steroid clobetasol, could restore movement to mice that were paralyzed by a rodent version of MS. In lab tests, the researchers prompted inactive mouse and human stem cells to regenerate the insulating layer myelin.