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.

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.