Profile Books have acquired a ground-breaking book by University of Kent social psychology professor Mark van Vugt and London Times science writer and journalist Anjana Ahuja that crosses business, psychology and current affairs in exploring the science of leadership. In HOMO ELECTUS: The New Science of Leadership, they reveal how and why leadership has evolved over tens of thousands of years, and present a new ‘mismatch hypothesis’: that the slowness of evolution means that there is a disjunction between modern leadership and the kind of leadership that our Stone Age brains are still wired for. This presents all sorts of tendencies, problems and solutions that no other authors have yet examined. Daniel Crewe, Associate Publisher at Profile, pre-empted UK & Commonwealth rights; US rights will be sold through Christy Fletcher of Fletcher & Co in New York. Publication is set for 2010. Crewe says: ‘This is a fascinating, important and definitive book on how leadership affects us all, explaining everything from why young people join terrorist groups and what companies can do to make employees happier, to what Gordon Brown can do to improve his chances at the next election. Mark and Anjana combine authority, a popular touch and smart analysis of cutting-edge research to provide deep insight into our personal, professional and political lives'.

A controversial new book arguing that the concept of post-traumatic stress disorder should be abandoned has been acquired by Anne Lawrance at Little, Brown in the UK and Lara Heimert at Basic Books in the US. For the past 20 years, the author, Stephen Joseph, has worked with survivors of trauma, most notably those of the 1987 Herald of Free Enterprise ferry disaster. During this time he and his colleagues have made a startling discovery. Hundreds of studies show that a wide range of events – from illnesses, divorce, separation, assault and bereavement to accidents, natural disasters and terrorism – can act as a catalyst for positive change. In WHEN STUFF HAPPENS: The New Psychology of Living with Change, Joseph, co-director of the Centre for Trauma, Resilience and Growth at Nottingham University in the UK, reveals how we all have this innate ability for growth and can nurture it to find new meaning, purpose and direction in life. The book will be published in Spring 2011.

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.