A Positron Named Priscilla

The nine National Academy of Sciences scholars represented in these challenging papers are mostly mid-career researchers in emergent areas, like David Holzman, whose ``Fold, Spindle and Regulate!'' looks at the workings of proteins, and Elizabeth J. Maggio, who writes about buckyballs in ``Bouncing Balls of Carbon.'' The frivolous title does not really serve an anthology of papers which falls just shy of the format and level of a scientific journal: graduate readings are prerequisite for most entries with the possible exception of Addison Greenwood's ``Clocks in the Earth?: The Science of Earthquake Prediction.'' With such a wide range of fields (from physics to mathematics to geoscience to biology), few popular science readers will be able to absorb more than two or three of these reports from ``frontiers'' without futher reference. Publisher W. H. Freeman's Scientific American Reader series has often brought this level of research into better focus by keeping to one discipline. 20,000 first printing. (Feb.)