Matthew Cobb's THE RESISTANCE: The French Fight Against the Nazis, to be published by Simon & Schuster in June 2009, has been condensed into a word cloud – all 145,000 words of it. Click here to see the result. Could this be the future of publishing?

Virgin Books have bought world English rights for a book on the epic quest to discover the origins of mass in the universe – a quest about to reach its climax in the LHC particle accelerator deep underground at CERN near Geneva. Ed Faulkner, editorial director, will publish MASSIVE: The Hunt for the God Particle as a major lead title in early 2010. Written by Ian Sample, an award-winning science correspondent at the Guardian newspaper in London, the book aims to do for particle physics what Moondust did for lunar exploration, combining cultural history with biography and reportage, but underpinned with science – and drawing on the author's interviews Peter Higgs, the reclusive British scientist at the heart of the story.

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.