Jesse Bering has started a new column in Scientific American. So far he's looked at darwinian theories of religion, researchers who place their lives at risk in the name of science, why homosexual males navigate like women, and how dog owners can pick their pooch out of a lineup by smell alone.

Last year Jo Marchant made this video for New Scientist of a reconstruction of the Antikythera mechanism, an ancient Greek computer that is the subject of her book Decoding the Heavens. It's also been posted on YouTube, where it has so far attracted nearly three-quarters of a million viewers.

In an auction just days before Christmas, Dean Buonomano's BRAIN BUGS: How Our Brain's Flaws Shape Our Lives was sold to Angela von der Lippe at Norton. The author, a professor in the departments of neurobiology and psychology at the University of California Los Angeles, aims to provide a comprehensive tour of our mental glitches, examining their causes and consequences as well as providing insights into how our brains can be debugged. Addressing topics ranging from molecular receptors and nerve synapses, to fear and phantom limbs, shopping and gambling, and time, religion and consciousness, his book is set to be the first to look at our inherent cognitive weaknesses in the context of the recent revolution in our understanding of neural associations. Norton acquired world English rights, and plans to publish in Autumn 2010.

The Science Factory has just sold a landmark new book on intelligence to Yale University Press. In THE REASON MACHINE: How Intelligence Happens, John Duncan, a Cambridge cognitive neuroscientist and fellow of the Royal Society, provides a first-hand account of the search for the biological basis of 'general intelligence' that reveals what we actually mean by intelligence, how and why it happens and what this can tell us about ourselves. The book is based on the author's widely publicized finding of a region in the frontal lobes of the brain that seems to be at the core of problem solving. World English rights were acquired in a pre-empt by Jean Black, who plans to publish the book in Autumn 2010.

On the eve of the Frankfurt Book Fair, the Science Factory has done a deal for a long-awaited popular science book by one of the world's most distinguished evolutionary biologists. Blind since early childhood, Geerat Vermeij is a MacArthur Fellow and recipient of the National Academy of Sciences Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal for 'extracting major generalizations about biological evolution from the fossil record, by feeling details that other scientists only see'. In THE EVOLUTIONARY WORLD, he shows how the central tenets of evolution have implications for humanity ranging from education, religion and warfare to climate change, economic regulation and political incumbency. Joel Ariaratnam at Thomas Dunne Books acquired at auction world English language rights in the title, which will be published in Autumn 2009. 'It’s a book that I think will touch not just the brain but the imagination of readers: a far more powerful and rare experience than what one encounters in most popular science books – much like James Gleick's Chaos did to me all those years ago', says Joel.