TV magician Paul Daniels has died at the age of 77. The UK star, who fronted “The Paul Daniels Magic Show” for 15 years on the BBC, passed away following a brain tumor diagnosis, the corporation reports.

Daniels’s son Gary confirmed the news on Twitter, posting a picture of a rabbit in a magician’s hat with a tear in its eye, alongside the message: “It is with incredible sadness that I can confirm that Dad, Paul Daniels, passed away overnight.”

It is with incredible sadness that I can confirm that Dad, @ThePaulDaniels, passed away over night. pic.twitter.com/XhZepFJ4DW

— Gary Daniels (@AllNRG) March 17, 2016

The star also hosted a series of non-magic shows throughout the 1980s and 90s, including “Odd One Out” and “Wipeout.”

An experimental vaccine against dengue, the world’s most common mosquito-borne virus, was 100 percent effective in early trials and could speed up the pace of a vaccine against Zika, researchers said Wednesday.

Dengue — which is in the same family of flaviviruses as Zika — infects some 390 million people each year in more than 120 countries of the world.

Dengue symptoms are often mild, but more than two million people annually develop dengue hemorrhagic fever — which can involve severe headaches, pain behind the eyes, rash, pain in the joints, muscles or bones pain, and leaking blood vessels.

More than 25,000 people die of dengue hemorrhagic fever each year.

“Knowing what we know about this new vaccine, we are confident that it is going to work,” said lead author Anna Durbin, associate professor in International Health at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University.

“And we have to be confident: Dengue is unique and if you don’t do it right, you can do more harm than good.”

Four strains

The vaccine candidate, known as TV003, was tested in a group of 48 people — half of whom received the vaccine, with the other half given a placebo.

TV003 is made by researchers at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) from a mixture of four weakened but live viruses, targeted to each of the four serotypes of dengue.

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Six months after vaccination, the two groups were exposed to a weakened form of dengue serotype 2 virus, the hardest of the four dengue strains to prevent.

Previous research on TV003, which has been in development for 15 years, had shown it worked well at preventing dengue 1, 3 and 4 viruses.

However, the “portion of the vaccine that was designed to prevent dengue 2 did not induce as strong an immune response in people as the other three components,” said a statement from Johns Hopkins.

This time, researchers looked beyond antibody response “for the evidence of actual infection: virus in the blood, rash and low white blood cell count.”

Of the 41 people that remained in the study until the end, none of the 21 who were vaccinated showed any evidence of dengue.

The 20 in the placebo group all had dengue virus in their blood. Eighty percent of them developed a rash, and 20 percent showed lower white blood cell counts, suggesting their bodies were fighting an infection.

The study was done in the United States, where dengue does not circulate in the population.

This helped researchers identify the vaccine’s effectiveness in people who had not been previously exposed to any strain of dengue.

“The findings from this trial are very encouraging to those of us who have spent many years working on vaccine candidates to protect against dengue, a disease that is a significant burden in much of the world and is now endemic in Puerto Rico,” said Stephen Whitehead, of the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

A larger, phase III trial of TV003 began last month in Brazil. It is one of several candidate vaccines currently in clinical trials.

Zika virus

Researchers said their findings may assist in the development of a vaccine against Zika, which has been linked to surge in birth defects in Brazil.

Top US health experts have said a vaccine against the mosquito-borne disease will take years to develop.

“We think that this is a tool that can really accelerate vaccine development, it’s a tool that we think can be extrapolated to others flaviviruses,” said Durbin.

“We hope to do this with Zika virus. There’s an urgent need for a Zika vaccine.”

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Stay tuned to Brandsynario for more updates.

Pope Francis will make his Instagram debut on Saturday, joining the likes of Justin Bieber and Cristiano Ronaldo on the image-sharing forum under the handle Franciscus, the Vatican confirmed Wednesday.

The date for the pontiff’s debut on the celebrity-dominated social medium was chosen by the 79-year-old himself as it marks the third anniversary of his inauguration as the leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics.

The move represents the latest plank of a Vatican social media strategy designed to ensure Francis’s message reaches a maximum number of believers and non-believers across the world with particular focus on the younger generation.

Francis is already a major player on Twitter. Under the @Pontifex handle he tweets in nine languages, including Latin, with the English account followed by nearly nine million people and the Spanish one by more than 11 million.

The move to join Instagram has been anticipated for some time as it is now bigger and faster-growing than Twitter with some 400 million users worldwide.

Kevin Systrom, Instagram’s CEO and co-founder, met the pontiff at the Vatican last month, later revealing they had discussed “the power of images to unite people across different cultures and languages.”

In a post on his own Instagram account, Systrom also said: “It was by far one of the most memorable experiences of my life!”

Francis joined the Twittersphere four days after his March 2013 election with what has become his trademark appeal to believers to “pray for me.”

The central importance of prayer has been a recurring theme of the tweets that have followed, at a rate of a little under one a day.

Some have been barely comprehensible to non-Catholics such as: “The Sacraments, especially Confession and the Eucharist, are privileged places of encountering Christ.”

But it has not all been theology. He has also used the medium to react to global events like Typhoon Hiayan/Yolanda, or voice his views on the social issues of the day.

Francis has also demonstrated a nice line in homespun tips for living, such as: “I cannot imagine a Christian who does not know how to smile.”

To date however his Twitter feed has been short on images with only two photographs and one short video clip uploaded.

And given that he nearly always wears the same clothes and spends most of his time in one place, generating an interesting photo stream for Instagram will present some challenges for his media team.

On the upside, Francis does have a steady flow of interesting visitors, he gets to some remote places and he does have exclusive access to the artistic treasures of the Vatican museums.

Francis’s interest in the Internet was underlined in January when he spoke out against online trolls. He has also hosted major figures in the new digital economy, including Google boss Eric Schmidt and Apple supremo Tim Cook.

Denmark has reclaimed the title of world’s happiest country, bumping Switzerland to second place in this year’s edition of the UN’s World Happiness Report.

Released to coincide with World Happiness Day on March 20, the UN released the fourth edition of the index which ranks 156 countries by their “happiness levels.”

After losing the title to Switzerland last year, Denmark stole back the crown of world’s happiest country — a title it’s claimed three out of four years.

New this year, the report also took into consideration the “inequality” of happiness and well-being among citizens. Dominating the top 10 list are Nordic and Scandinavian countries, with Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Finland and Sweden taking up half the spots.

To compile the ranking, editors considered the GDP per capita; the healthy years of life expectancy; social support; trust (measured by a perceived absence of corruption in government and business); freedom to make life decisions; generosity (measured by donations); and new this year, happiness inequality.

Because after studying rates of distribution, editors say they found a correlation between countries with more equal distributions of well-being and higher life evaluations.

Happiness is argued to serve as a better indication of human welfare than income, poverty, education, health and good government when measured separately.

The importance of making happiness and well-being a matter of public policy has also been recognized by four national governments: Bhutan, Ecuador, the United Arab Emirates and Venezuela have all appointed ministers of happiness.

Denmark has repeatedly taken the top spot in happiness and life satisfaction rankings be it the UN or the OECD, thanks in part to generous parental leave policies, gender equality, work-life balance, and safety.

Here are the world’s top 10 happiest countries:

1. Denmark
2. Switzerland
3. Iceland
4. Norway
5. Finland
6. Canada
7. Netherlands
8. New Zealand
9. Australia
10. Sweden

Landing at the bottom of the World Happiness Report index are Burundi, Syria and Togo.