European Union

The European Union is to spend €105 billion on environmental initiatives to maintain Europe’s leadership in the field of green technologies.

When new European Commissioners are chosen later this year, they should take the opportunity to create a Vice President for Innovation, says Richard L. Hudson.

Science and research will be held up as part of the solution to economic malaise at next week’s EU summit, where there is one broad topic on the agenda: the economic downturn.

The EU is funding a one year programme, Nanomed, to stake out the potential applications of nanomedicine and inform the investments it makes through FP7.

A German plan to boost early-stage investment ran foul of the European Commission last week, sparking protests from business angels.

The latest Innovation Scoreboard shows Europe is far short of its 2010 target of boosting R&D spending to 3 per cent of GDP.

A pan-European project to develop standards for the collection of samples for use in diagnostics has been launched as part of Framework Programme 7. The project aims to increase accuracy and safety, and to create a single market for diagnostics products.

Europe’s bid to lead the world in developing hydrogen and fuel cells risks failure because the planned investment is too little, the trade group Fuel Cell Europe heard.

After the genome, the proteome, the metabolome and the transcriptome, lipids are the next entities to be subject to minute, whole-organism analysis.