Some customers burst into tears when they first bite into one of her cakes. It's not just that they're good... they're gluten-free.

Marie Tagliaferro is one of the very few -- if not the only pastry chef in pastry-loving France -- to offer customers such delicacies in a country where gluten intolerance has long been considered a problem of the very young.

The soldier on the fringes of an explosion. The survivor of a car wreck. The football player who took yet another skull-rattling hit. Too often, only time can tell when a traumatic brain injury will leave lasting harm — there's no good way to diagnose the damage.

Now scientists are testing a tool that lights up the breaks these injuries leave deep in the brain's wiring, much like X-rays show broken bones.

The head of Taiwan's top research group says the island's budding biotechnology industry is facing a tough new rival — Samsung Electronics Co.

The South Korean electronics giant already poses a threat to Taiwanese chip and computer makers.

Contrary to popular belief, older people do not suffer as many sleeping problems as the young and a good night's rest may actually get easier with age, said a U.S. study released on Thursday.

Based on a telephone survey with more than 150,000 American adults, people in their 80s had the fewest complaints about their sleeping patterns, while those in middle age, particularly women, had the most.

Researchers are reporting the first treatment to speed recovery from severe brain injuries caused by falls and car crashes: a cheap flu medicine whose side benefits were discovered by accident decades ago.

Severely injured patients who were given amantadine got better faster than those who received a dummy medicine. After four weeks, more people in the flu drug group could give reliable yes-and-no answers, follow commands or use a spoon or hairbrush — things that few of them could do at the start. Far fewer patients who got amantadine remained in a vegetative state, 17 percent versus 32 percent.

Some cancer drugs used to treat patients with leukemia may also help stop the Ebola virus and give the body time to control the infection before it turns deadly, US researchers said on Wednesday.

The much-feared Ebola virus emerged in Africa in the 1970s and can incite a hemorrhagic fever which causes a person to bleed to death in up to 90 percent of cases.

Older women who eat high amounts of the kind of fat found in fried foods and baked goods face a greater risk of stroke than women who eat lower fat diets, a U.S. study suggested on Thursday.

However, aspirin use could cut those risks, said the researchers from University of North Carolina whose findings are published in the Annals of Neurology.

Divides have emerged between the US and world response on whether to publish or keep secret the details of an engineered mutant bird flu virus that can pass in the air between animals, health experts said on Wednesday.

But that split could be resolved when new data, including how the disease is not as lethal as widely believed, is considered in an upcoming meeting of the U.S.-based advisory panel which initially urged the details be withheld from science journals.

The number of women dying from breast cancer in the European Union is expected to drop by nine percent this year thanks to advances in treatments, researchers said on Wednesday.

In the 20-49 age group specifically, the death rate in 2012 will fall by as much as 13 percent, the Italian-Swiss study found.

Illegal online pharmacies are using social media to attract young customers and sell them illicit drugs and medicines, a U.N. agency warned Tuesday.

"Illegal Internet pharmacies have started to use social media to get customers for their websites," Hamid Ghodse, president of the International Narcotics Control Board, said in the agency's annual report published Tuesday.