Radioactive fall-out from test explosions of atomic bombs has made clear to Americans that nuclear warfare would mean annihilation of large areas. Less well understood is the fact that leakage of radioactive materials resulting from careless operation of atomic power plants and other peacetime uses of nuclear energy can be just as deadly. For a sober review of the facts about radiation we turn to N. J. BERRILL, Professor of Zoology at McGill University. A leading embryologist and specialist in marine biology, Professor Berrill is the author of several books, including Journey into Wonder, Sex and the Nature of Things, and Man’s Emerging Mind, which will be published this fall by Dodd, Mead.

Educated at Harvard and Oxford, MICHAEL MACCOBY taught at Harvard and at (he University of Chicago. In 1960, he went to Mexico on a U.S. Public Health Fellowship from the National Institute of Mental Health. He is working with Erich Fromm on a study of a Mexican village which they call Las Cuevas. He is also practicing as a psychoanalyst, and he teaches at the Nalional University in Mexico City.

Modern science has penetrated the mysteries of space, but the nature of the earth’s depths remains to be explored. N. J. BERRILL here gives us an account of the theories thus far advanced by geologists and biologists regarding our changing planet. Mr. Berrill is professor of zoology at McGill University and the author of several books, includingJOURNEY INTO WONDER, SEX AND THE NATURE OF THINGS,andMAN’S EMERGING MIND.

It is fitting and typical of Sean O’Casey that his last work, this essay on the theater of decay and despair, should be more than a polemic . It is a vigorous affirmation that life is worth living from a great playwright whose own early work set off a riot in a Dublin theater and was called “sewage .”Mr. O’Casey wrote the article a few weeks before his death last September at the age of eighty-four.

What effect climate has on life and the conditions under which life might be supported on other planets was a subject explored recently by a group of scientists including HARLOW SHAPLEY.AS Paine Professor of Astronomy and Director of the Harvard Observatory, Harlow Shapley became internationally known for his famous studies of the Galaxies. The article which follows is part of a book, Climatic Change, by Dr. Shapley and others, to be published in December for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences by Harvard University Press.

The son of a famous French physiologist, JEAN MAYERcame to the United States before the war to pursue his studies; but the war called him home, and as a Gaullist he fought for five years with the Free French forces. He got a Ph.D. at Yale Medical School in 1948, a D.Sc. from the Sorbonne, and in 1950 joined the faculty of the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, where his studies on obesity have attracted wide attention.