“Torture numbers and they will confess to anything,” author Gregg Easterbrook once wrote in a magazine piece on climate change. But his quip could have been the subtitle for this new book on the abuse of numbers in the courts. Its authors, mother-daughter mathematicians, belong to a research group devoted to improving the use of statistics in criminal trials. Each chapter focuses on cases exemplifying a particular class of statistical error. Poignant tales detail exonerations resulting from faulty math used in the original trials (errors usually corrected only after intervention by stati... (p. 30)

The periodic table, which arranges elements based on chemical behavior and physical properties, is a triumph of science. Yet the first table, developed in the late 1860s, was riddled with gaps created by undiscovered elements. By the time researchers recognized in 1913 that elements should be arranged by atomic number (the number of protons in their nuclei) rather than by atomic weight, only seven gaps remained in the list of naturally occurring elements. Chapter by chapter and element by element, Scerri, a historian of science, chronicles scientists’ efforts to fill those holes. A bonus... (p. 30)

Buy Zombie Birds, Astronaut Fish and Other Weird Animals Buy Weird Life Even on bad days, humans don’t have their tongues eaten by crustaceans. Fish in the English Channel are not so lucky, reports Crew, a science writer. Neither have human males evolved into little more than mobile genitals that attach to females for life, as have some anglerfish. Putting our own species’ vexations in perspective may be a big part of the fun of reading about other life-forms. Whatever drives biodiversity gawking, it’s persistent. So is, thank goodness, the stream of books that satisfies it. Crew’... (p. 30)

In late 1942, less than a year after Pearl Harbor, the U.S. government began snapping up property in eastern Tennessee. Within a matter of months, approximately 59,000 acres of farms and orchards, homesteads and hovels just south of the Black Oak Ridge hosted immense construction sites that became the home of supersecret facilities used to enrich uranium for the Manhattan Project. Kiernan chronicles the fascinating lives of some of the young women who lived and worked in this fenced-in town, helping to develop the first atomic bombs. At its wartime peak, the largely self-contained Oak Ridge ... (p. 30)

Artemis may look like any other goat, but a little human DNA inserted into her genetic code gives her life-saving potential. This University of California, Davis wonder produces milk rich in the bacteria-busting enzyme lysozyme, a compound that could help prevent some of the hundreds of thousands of deaths from diarrhea worldwide each year. “Science has given us a whole new toolbox for tinkering with life,” writes journalist Anthes. Frankenstein’s Cat shows off just a small sampling of this humanmade (or at least human-modified) menagerie. Some, like Artemis, are the result of genetic ... (p. 30)