The European Commission adopted new rules for investing public money in small private companies that it says will make it easier for start-ups to raise risk capital.

Merlin Biosciences has been under the cloud of an investigation by the UK's Serious Fraud Office. Now founder Chris Evans says the firm is planning new investments.

Yochai Benkler and Lawrence Lessig are two well-known law professors affiliated with very prestigious US universities, Yale and Stanford, respectively. They are specialised in intellectual property like policemen are specialised in crime: it is their bailiwick but they do not particularly like it.

The American Bar Association makes available its take on the USA's "federal environmental statutes" and their implications for nanotechnology.

The Food Standards Agency in the UK has published its Science Strategy 2005-10

New approaches are needed for predicting the safe dose of novel drugs that are designed to interact with highly specific human targets because existing preclinical toxicology studies may be inadequate.

We applaud a rare bout of honesty.

The IP battlefield is large and diversified. It goes way beyond highly-publicized battles about patenting genes or semi-conductor designs. A case in point is a lawsuit filed July 14 by Materialise nv, a spin-off of Belgium’s Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, against a Swiss-Swedish company, Nobel Biocare.

The EU is surveying the remuneration of researchers.

You have until the end of the month to tell the EU about your "needs in relation to transnational research cooperation and knowledge transfer between public research organisations".