Spanish researchers have developed a technology that allows even the tone deaf to pick music with the right rhythm and tempo to keep the mass swaying.

The UK's stem cell community has reacted with collective dismay at the final confirmation that Hwang Woo-suk's claims to have generated patient-specific embryonic stem cell lines were fraudulent. Nuala Moran takes a look.

Venture capital firms used to moan that business angels were unprofessional and hard to work with. But Europe's new breed of angel investor networks appears anything but that, says Mary Lisbeth D'Amico

The annual growth of biotech cultivation grew last year at its slowest pace since 1996, when biotech crops were first commercialised, according to a report by the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications, a non-profit group that advocates the use of bio-crops.

For some it was like a very bad Greek tragedy, for others a hoax more naive than the Piltdown man. But Hwang Wo-suk's fall from grace puts the UK on level terms with South Korea in the race to generate embryonic stem cells from cloned embryos.

Researchers at the Advanced Technology Institute at the University of Surrey recently reported that they have shown and observed a phenomenon called negative differential resistance - holding out the prospect of a new generation of cheap and fast semiconductors.

Venture capitalists are once again funding nanotech start-ups, but their overall investment is small compared with government funding and corporate R&D spending, says to a new report.

In his first interview since taking up the job, Bruno van Pottelsberghe, the 37-year-old newly appointed chief economist at the European Patent Office, bemoans the failure to create a single EU-wide patent.

"With engineering I view this year's failure as next year's opportunity to try it again...." Gordon E. Moore, co-founded Intel in 1968