Tennessee has decided how it will respond to a nationwide scarcity of lethal injection drugs for death-row inmates: with the electric chair.

Republican Gov. Bill Haslam signed a bill into law Thursday allowing the state to electrocute death row inmates in the event prisons are unable to obtain the drugs, which have become more and more scarce following a European-led boycott of drug sales for executions.

A Swiss assisted suicide group has expanded its services to help elderly patients who are sick but not terminally ill end their lives, it said Thursday.

Exit A.D.M.D., a group that provides assisted suicide in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, officially broadened the scope of who it can help during its general assembly last month, its leader Doctor Jerome Sobel told Agence France Presse.

The world's first miniaturized kidney dialysis machine has saved the lives of eight babies in nine months, the Italian scientists who raised the money to build it said on Friday.

Until now, babies with kidney failure were treated with machines built for adults, with smaller filters and other imprecise adaptations that tend to withdraw too much or too little of the waste fluid building up in the body.

Researchers have discovered an antibody-generating protein that could help prevent multiplication of malaria parasites inside the body, giving new hope for a vaccine, a study said Thursday.

The protein could aid scientists in their work fighting the most severe forms of malaria, a disease that kills more than 600,000 people each year, particularly young children in sub-Saharan Africa.

Surprising new research shows a small but diverse community of bacteria lives in the placentas of healthy pregnant women, overturning the belief that fetuses grow in a pretty sterile environment.

These are mostly varieties of "good germs" that live in everybody. But Wednesday's study also hints that the make-up of this microbial colony plays a role in premature birth.

Women diagnosed with cancer in one breast often face a difficult decision of whether to surgically remove both, and a study Wednesday found double mastectomies may be performed too often.

The surgery does not increase survival in most women, and is typically recommended for about 10 percent of women considered at high risk for breast cancer.

They suffer searing headaches, a burning fever and so much pain in their joints they can barely walk or use their hands. It's like having a terrible flu combined with an abrupt case of arthritis.

Hospitals and clinics throughout the Caribbean are seeing thousands of people with the same symptoms, victims of a virus with a long and unfamiliar name that has been spread rapidly by mosquitoes across the islands after the first locally transmitted case was confirmed in December.

Eating a hearty breakfast and lunch might benefit people suffering from Type 2 diabetes who are now encouraged to go with up to six small portions a day, according to a new study.

"We compared the efficiency of the classic model with five or six small meals a day with that of two larger meals, breakfast and lunch, having more or less the same daily calorie count," Hana Kahleova, a researcher at Prague's IKEM institute, told Agence France Presse on Tuesday.

French medical authorities have ordered a prestigious laboratory to suspend its activities after it lost more than 2,000 test tubes containing the SARS respiratory virus.

The Pasteur Institute reported the tubes missing last month from one of its labs, but insisted in a statement that the tubes do not pose any infection risk. The institute asked the ANSM medical safety agency to carry out inspections at the lab.

Australian children are among the least active in the world, ranking behind those in Britain and New Zealand, researchers say warning that the sports-mad nation was raising a "generation of couch potatoes".

A study released Wednesday showed that more than 80 percent of Australian children aged 5 to 17 failed to get the recommended 60 minutes of moderate physical activity a day, despite most playing a sport.