Top materials scientist Eicke Weber has been lured back to Germany from the US after 23 years, to take over at the helm of the Fraunhofer’s Institute of Solar Energy.

India's failure to launch a functional communications satellite using a home-grown rocket is likely to spur even more investment in space programmes.

Nanotechnology looks like generating more paper than profits as yet another policy review gets under way.

For the last three years, the French parliament has been struggling with legislation on copyright and associated rights in information society. It has surfaced in the headlines, portrayed as a fight to force Apple to make its iTunes music downloads playable on competing music boxes. But there's more involved.

A key distinction between physical and intellectual property is that the value of the latter is created as much by sharing it as by owning it. How to share it, between creator and enabler, is a particularly acute issue within the academic environment - as indicated by a recent, noteworthy debate on the subject in Sweden.

Germany's academic spin-outs are not such a force for developing the economy after all, according to an in depth study of 20 of their number.

The Health Research Board of Ireland is to join the consortium of UK research funders developing a single gateway to the largest pool of patients in the world.

As the European Commission ponders the single European patent, the European Patent Office is under attack from national patent offices that want some of its functions.

Technology transfer is a sensitive and complex process. Changing one factor won’t provide the magic bullet, says Anna S. Nilsson, Science and Technology Attaché at the Swedish Embassy in Washington DC.

Israel’s high-tech incubator companies are joining the stock market – and perhaps providing a new model for technology commercialisation