The overarching goal of the Presidency in the field of R&D is the further development of the European Research (ERA). Being one of the central pillars to achieve the Lisbon objectives, the full realization of ERA will significantly contribute to making Europe the most competitive knowledge-based economy in the world.

eHealthNews.EU Portal, the first European eHealth news portal, is announcing the Top 20 news articles of the 2007 year, according to the collected 'page views' web statistics:

1. HEALTHINF 2008 - Call for Papers
The purpose of the HEALTHINF 2008 - International Conference on Health Informatics (28-31 January 2008, Funchal, Maderia - Portugal) is to bring together researchers and practitioners interested in the application of information and communication technologies (ICT) to healthcare and medicine in general and to the specialized support to persons with special needs in particular.

One year into the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) and action is well underway, with the third call for proposals currently active. Information on the first projects accepted for funding under FP7 has now also been published on CORDIS, the EU's official information service for research and development.

State of the art digital technology that has revolutionised the way the NHS captures, records and uses patient x-ray and scans is now being used in every hospital trust in England, the Department of Health said today. Picture Archiving and Communications Systems (PACS) are replacing the old way of capturing x-rays and scans on film and paper enabling clinical images to be stored electronically and viewed on screen.

Funded by the European Commission, DG Information Society and Media, eHealth ERA investigated and analysed eHealth priorities and deployment activities in European countries. The project developed a database of key national eHealth policy documents, a database of key national contact points for eHealth research and technology development, and it produced several extended reports about current eHealth issues.

Two supercomputing networks have successfully joined forces in a distributed simulation of the effectiveness of drugs on mutant strains of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). Although the Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Application (DEISA) and the GridAustralia-Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing (APAC) infrastructures use incompatible underlying platforms (UNICORE 5 and Globus Tool Kit, respectively), the researchers were able to spread the computing tasks over the two high performance computing (HPC) grids.

While the public in Member States that were part of the EU before 2004 are generally open to science news, with more than 62% saying that they are interested in scientific research, this figure falls to just 38% for those Member States that joined since 2004. The differences range from 80% in Sweden to just 24% in Bulgaria. This is just one of the findings in a new Eurobarometer survey on scientific research in the media.