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Not so much a geological specimen as something that will make nanotechnology happen, dendrimers are the young upstarts of the polymer family - but they have promise.

There's nothing light about the scope and ambitions of the University of Manchester's new interdisciplinary Photon Science Institute. The £40 million institute aims to be world-class in pioneering light and laser technologies.

Nanotechnology has the power to transform healthcare. But Europe will lose out to the United States unless it can mount a coherent approach to developing nanomedicine, says a new report.

Scientists at the University of Manchester have invented an electronic nose that can monitor odours and methane at waste landfill and water treatment plants remotely.

Scientists at the John Innes plant research centre in Norwich, UK have uncovered a gene that could form the basis of new crop varieties able to cope with changes in world climate brought about by global warming.

Researchers at the University of Bonn in Germany have succeeded in finding a potentially low-cost source of a potent antiviral compound known to prevent replication of the HIV virus in vitro.

Europe preaches the knowledge society, but its aversion to risk and reluctance to change has got to go, warns Esko Aho, former prime minister of Finland.

"There is a large gap between the rhetoric of a political system that preaches the Knowledge Society and the reality of budgetary and other priorities that have shown little shift in preparing to engage with it." Esko Aho, former Prime Minister of Finland, in Creating an Innovative Europe, January 2006.

Last month the world's leading pharmaceutical company received simultaneous FDA approval for two new therapies. Yet neither drug was invented by the company. Both were originally developed by small biotechs.

There is much more work to do to convince public opinion that bioscience is a force for good, says UK BioIndustry Association chairman Simon Best.

On 26 January, in London, Science|Business organised a roundtable of executives in the biotech industry to discuss the state of the market. The consensus: investor appetite for biotech companies is on the rise.

With high oil prices showing no sign of quitting, "cleantech" is the new darling VC investment sector. But, asks Mary Lisbeth D'Amico, is the market more froth than substance?

Ireland's fastest-growing companies hired even more aggressively than other top job-creating European companies during 2001-2004, according to a survey conducted by Entrepreneurs for Growth, a membership-based organisation representing 2,000 European firms.

The founding dean of INSEAD's Singapore campus is moving to the UK to head up the Judge Business School at Cambridge.

TU Delft ditched the usual model of outlicensing or seeking venture capital backing when it was looking to commercialise a novel wastewater treatment technology.

In the past five years the state of Saxony in the former East Germany has made great strides in creating a biosciences sector – outstripping progress made by some of its counterparts in the more prosperous west of the country.

Dental implant company Neoss Ltd raised £5 million in its third funding round, enabling it to further develop the technology and expand its sales and marketing operations.