Jo Marchant's Decoding the Heavens and Manjit Kumar's Quantum have both been longlisted for this year's Royal Society Prize for Science Books. The shortlist will be announced on Thursday 25 June 2009, and the winner will be announced at a ceremony at the Royal Society on 15 September 2009 and awarded £10,000. For more details see Royal Society Science Books. Quantum has also been shortlisted for the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize.

Manjit Kumar's QUANTUM has been shortlisted for the £20,000 BBC Samuel Johnson Prize. The shortlist of six shows strong bias towards 'scientific discovery and scientific malpractice', according to the Guardian.

Manjit Kumar's QUANTUM has been longlisted for the £20,000 BBC Samuel Johnson Prize. A strong scientific flavour dominates this year's candidates for the UK's most prestigious non-fiction award, with Richard Holmes, Ben Goldacre, Steve Jones, Patricia Fara and Elizabeth Pisani all in contention (among 19 authors in total). See here for more details.

The Science Factory London Book Fair 2009 catalogue is now available as a PDF download here. The fair runs from 20 to 22 April, and the Science Factory will be representing its authors and titles at table 9R in the International Rights Centre. Full details of the co-agents who handle translation rights on behalf of the Science Factory can be found at the back of the catalogue.

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'.