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The time is not right to breathe back life into the European software patent, says Francisco Mingorance from the Business Software Alliance. Thomas Lau investigates.

Everyone wants to encourage innovation. But, says Alain de Serres from the OECD, a survey of the world’s leading industrial countries shows they are going about it in different ways and with very different results.

The Scotsman reports on a life sciences industry meeting in Edinburgh, and sparks off some thoughts about Qinetiq.

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.