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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.

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.

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.

"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

Lein Applied Diagnostics, a British company that develops blood glucose measuring for people with diabetes, has announced it has received further investment from its shareholder Seven Spires Investments. The company is seeking more investment to put a non-invasive blood glucose meter into clinical trials.

The concept of angel investing - in which individuals devote both their time and money to nurturing young companies - has evolved over the past decade from an unknown or poorly understand phenomena in many parts of Europe to an established form of finance.

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.

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

Marc Van Montagu, Europe's founding father of genetically modified crops and a powerful advocate for their acceptance in Europe, speaks to Science|Business News Editor Thomas Lau.

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.

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.

Micromet AG, a spin-off from the Institute for Immunology at Munich University, said it has agreed to grant four licenses of its single chain antibody technology to Abbott Laboratories, Alligator Bioscience AB, Haptogen Ltd. and an unnamed biopharmaceutical company, for the development of cancer treatments.