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Cold & Heredity. Not only X-rays but extremes of temperature produce such mutations as abnormal eyes, queer-shaped wings and bald thoraxes in Drosophila melanogaster, the little fruit fly made famous by the genetic researches of Thomas Hunt Morgan. Many a geneticist suspects that the impacts of cosmic rays also start mutations working in the germ plasm. When the National Geographic Society's balloon Explorer II made its record-breaking flight into the upper air last year, Dr. Victor Jollos of the University of Wisconsin sent jars of fruit flies up with it, outside the gondola. The insects died of cold, but offspring hatched from eggs laid during the flight developed five times the normal number of mutations. Dr. Jollos concluded that some of these were due to cosmic rays, but that the greater number were due to stratosphere cold.
Approach to Unity. Herculean struggle of modern theoretical physics is to find a mathematical system which will handle both the atom and the universe.
As things stand, students of the universe use Relativity mathematics and atomists use Quantum Mechanics. Princeton's Einstein has promised to devote the rest of his life to the search for and the formulation of a Unified Field Theory which will encompass all Nature. He has laid promising foundations (TIME, July 15, 1935). Other work on the problem has been done by Britain's Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac, German Exile Max Born, France's Elie Cartan. Last week another approach was suggested by Dr. George David Birkhoff of Harvard.
In the Birkhoff system, the hydrogen atom is contemplated as a mixture of two "perfect fluids"—the positive electricity of the nucleus, the negative electricity of the surrounding electron. The disturbance created in the fluids by a particle or light rav from outside can be expressed, very roughly speaking, as though they were water rippled by a falling stone. Furthermore, the expression can be formulated in Relativistic terms. Whether atoms with more than one electron can be crammed into the same mold remains to be seen.
Mighty Electron— Dr. Birkhoff, who believes that esthetics is closely linked to mathematics and once read some mathematical poetry of his own composition at an A. A. A. S. convention, was elected next year's president of the Association.
This year's president is one of Princeton's Grand Old Men, Biologist Edwin Grant Conklin. Retiring president is Physicist Karl Taylor Compton, who is also the President of M. I. T. and a brother of Nobel Laureate Arthur Holly Compton.
As a valedictory address Karl Taylor Compton gave a discourse on "The Electron: Its Intellectual and Social Significance" in which, as a lesson in the ultimate value of research in pure science, he pointed out that the invisible electron, once a figment in the mind of physics and later the plaything of a few pioneers, is now the ubiquitous slave of mankind.