As many as 400,000 people in North America suffer sudden cardiac arrest. Only 30% have their hearts restarted, and only about 6% survive to hospital discharge. Once the heart is restarted, a significant factor for subsequent death is brain injury.

The study was published in an advance online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on May 17.

In the fight against cancer, antisense drugs, which prevent genes from producing harmful proteins such as those that cause cancer, have the promise to be more effective than conventional drugs, but the pace of development of these new drugs has been slow.

Even with modern genomic tools, it's a daunting task to find a smoking gun for Darwinian evolution. The problem lies in being able to say not just when and how a specific gene mutated but also how that one genetic change translated into real-world dominance of one population over another.

A blood test may enable doctors to predict which smokers using the nicotine patch are likely to experience the least amount of cravings and have the highest probability of success in quitting cigarettes, according to the results of a study in the June issus of the Journal of Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics.

In this week's Analytical Chemistry, scientists at Indiana University Bloomington report biochemical machinery that allows mouse sperm cells to follow the weakest of scents. Even when ovary extracts were diluted 100,000 times, some sperm cells still found their mark.

A video demonstrating sperm chemotaxis (oriented motion in response to a chemical gradient) can be downloaded at http://www.iuinfo.indiana.edu/bem/media_relations/movie.chemotaxis.mpg(Credit: Stephen C. Jacobson, 2006).

Researchers exploring a Colombian mountain range found surviving members of a species of Harlequin frog believed extinct due to a killer fungus wiping out amphibian populations in Central and South America.

A protein long thought to provide only mechanical support for keeping cells and tissues from literally falling apart turns out to have much wider utility. In a pair of reports, the protein K17 has been found to also influence wound healing and maintain the structural integrity of hair follicles, according to Johns Hopkins researchers.

By blowing gentle puffs of air onto a mouse's whiskers and watching how its brain reacts, scientists are discovering that a long-overlooked signaling system in the brain is crucial to our everyday activity.