Parkinson's disease affects an estimated one in every 500 people in Europe – it is the second most common disease after Alzheimer's. With so many afflicted, one research team is trying to help people with Parkinson's living at home to overcome the social exclusion its symptoms can cause.

The European Commission reports on the initial findings from its wide public debate on Radio Frequency Identification. At the "RFID – Heading for the Future" conference in Brussels, possible future policy options will be discussed with stakeholders from all over Europe and beyond.

ScanBalt - the network of networks - has the vision of creating a competitive world-class meta-bioregion. ScanBalt BioRegion consists of the Nordic and Baltic countries as well as Poland, Northern Germany and Northwestern Russia (11 countries in total).

With Europe's population ageing rapidly and the demand for healthcare growing, healthcare services need to become more efficient. However, little hard evidence is available on the contribution of eHealth solutions.

The Network of Excellence (NoE) GA2LEN is urging policy makers to support the European Parliament's proposal to include allergic diseases in the health priorities of the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7).

The 2006 EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard shows that the top 1000 EU companies increased their R&D by an average of 5.3 % in 2005. This figure is in line with the results of a Commission survey released earlier this year. The top 1000 non-EU companies raised their R&D investment by 7.7%, showing a world-wide boost in R&D spending.

Janez Potocnik, the European Commissioner for Science and Research, has exhorted the countries of south-eastern Europe to invest more heavily in research.