The German Government has unveiled a new EUR 5.5 billion programme aimed at further strengthening the country's position in the information and communication technologies (ICT) sector.

The ICT sector in Germany has gone from strength to strength in recent years, triggering notable innovations. In the second half of the1990s, ICT investments accounted for 18% of the country's overall economic growth.

As the deadlines for the first calls for project proposals under the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) approach, the new Electronic Proposal Submission Service (EPSS) has been launched to facilitate submitting proposals online.

The EPSS allows users to propose projects by creating their proposal completely online without having to download or save anything locally on their own personal computer.

Germany's top supercomputing centres have signed a Memorandum of Understanding which brings them together to form Europe's most powerful computing network, the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS).

The German Government, which has allocated funding of €30 million to the project, hopes the initiative will raise the visibility of the centres involved and improve their chances of playing a key role in the establishment of a European high-performance computer network.

A multi-million pound visionary medical project that will recruit 500,000 people across Britain to help find out much more about curing many life threatening and debilitating diseases gets underway in Manchester. UK Biobank will recruit people aged 40-69 and track their health over the course of the next 30 years or more.

The European Commission's Health & Consumer Protection and Enterprise & Industry Directorates General recently launched a public consultation process to discuss ways to provide a practical and sustainable improvement of the information available to patients on health and treatment-related issues.

The inventors of biodegradable plastics, DNA fingerprinting and a new HIV drug are among 12 individuals and groups nominated for the European Inventor of the Year Award 2007.

The award, which is now in its second year, was set up by the European Commission and the European Patent Office.

For the first time the European ICT Prize awards ceremony took place at CeBIT, the world's largest ICT trade fair in Hannover, Germany. "Information and communications technology opens up a world of new possibilities - new ways of working and new ways of living," said Information Society and Media Commissioner Viviane Reding as she awarded the prizes.