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<jats:p>The panel that for more than a decade has vetted safety and ethical issues in U.S. human gene-therapy research—the Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee (RAC) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH)—ended its role as gatekeeper with a bang last week, grilling a researcher who had proposed a clinical trial that would inject engineered genes for the first time into normal, healthy volunteers. RAC's final act as enforcer also gave a preview of how it might handle the new role that NIH director Harold Varmus has envisioned for the committee—as a forum for debates on ethical issues.</jats:p>

<jats:p> <jats:bold>TOKYO</jats:bold> —A new $61 million Brain Science Institute at the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research is the centerpiece for an ambitious program to boost Japan's international profile in neuroscience and to better coordinate efforts at home. </jats:p>

<jats:p>A $50-a-year fee to register Internet domain names has netted a pot of money that could grow to $60 million a year—and has triggered a free-for-all over who should manage the Internet. It has also sparked an internal debate within NSF over whether the agency should continue to oversee a medium that it helped create.</jats:p>

<jats:p>From Denver, the “Mile-High City,” to California's Sierra Nevada, the American West stands high above sea level. For years, geologists thought that a thick, buoyant continental crust raised the West's spectacular scenery, but new geophysical surveys suggest that the forces holding up many Western mountains and plateaus come from much deeper, in Earth's mantle.</jats:p>

<jats:p>The American West may be high, but it's slowly sinking—and sliding northwest toward the Oregon coast, according to a new geophysical theory.</jats:p>

<jats:p>Quantum “noise” gets in the way of ultraprecise measurements of any physical quantity, such as a particle's location or a wave's frequency. In this issue, however, a team of physicists reports finding a way around this quantum limit for the wavelike vibrations of atoms in solids called phonons. By delivering ultrafast pulses of light to a sample of potassium tantalate, they squeezed quantum noise out of the phonons at certain times while making them noisier at others.</jats:p>

<jats:p> Health-conscious consumers may now have another reason for thinking that antioxidants might help protect against cancer. On page <jats:related-article xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" ext-link-type="doi" page="1649" related-article-type="in-this-issue" vol="275" xlink:href="10.1126/science.275.5306.1649" xlink:type="simple">1649</jats:related-article> , researchers report new results suggesting that superoxide-—a free radical consisting of an oxygen molecule with an extra electron—helps a protein called Ras transmit its growth-stimulating signals to the nucleus. Because overactivity of this pathway is thought to contribute to the development of a wide variety of cancers, the work provides further support for the idea that reactive oxygen species such as superoxide are good targets for anticancer drugs. George Bush, eat your broccoli! </jats:p>

<jats:p>The HOX gene family has helped to unlock the intricacies of development in animals from flies to mammals, but its role in humans has been a mystery. Now the second human HOX gene mutation has been found in a Michigan family. It causes abnormalities in both limbs and genitals—and raises some intriguing evolutionary ideas.</jats:p>

<jats:p> <jats:bold>LIVERMORE, CALIFORNIA</jats:bold> —Laser researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory here and at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., are setting out to challenge the view that lasers can't live up to the demands of an inertial-confinement fusion power plant. Such a plant would have to blast a pellet of fuel with powerful beams many times a second‐a pace thousands of times faster than existing lasers can manage. New laser technology, however, could change all that. </jats:p>

<jats:p>Signaling an end to pitched battles between rival labs, an international commission of chemists last month presented a revised list of names for elements 104 to 109 to chemistry's high court, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry. IUPAC will rule on the names this August.</jats:p>