The European Commission (EC) is inviting biotech firms to apply for research grants, if partnered with academia. For the first time, a quarter of the biotech-specific grants will require the participation of small and medium enterprises (SMEs). The EC plans to hand out €240.3 million ($310.2 million) in direct research grants in 2011, up 26% from the €190 million ($245.3 million) this year. Continue reading EC woos SMEs
Category Archives: Formats
Crested dinosaur pushes back dawn of feathers
A predatory dinosaur with bony bumps on its arms and a strange hump on its back provides evidence that feathers began to appear earlier than researchers thought, according to a report in Nature today.
The new species, named Concavenator corcovatus, was about 4 metres long from nose to tail and lived during the Early Cretaceous period, about 130 million years ago.
Read the rest of this news story on Nature News [html] or here [pdf].
This story got a mention on the Knight Science Journalism Tracker: here.
When Chickens Attack
Robotics engineer Stephen Roberts was taking his lunch at Somerville College at the University of Oxford, in England, when the conversation turned to chicken. It wasn’t the food, though. His dining companion was animal welfare specialist Marian Dawkins, and she thought that the pattern-recognition technology Roberts was explaining might help identify misbehaving hens. Continue reading When Chickens Attack
Iceland’s Monster Bares Its Heart
This past spring’s eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland was a nightmare for travelers, but it gave scientists in Europe unprecedented access to a complex eruption right in their backyard. Old workhorses of volcanology–seismometers and GPS sensors, which detect movement of the ground–first picked up Eyjafjallajökull’s stirrings in early January. (For the record: The name is pronounced “AY-yah-fyah-lah-YOH-kuul.”) But when the volcano turned volatile in mid-April, scientists took to the skies, enlisting specially equipped planes to study the eruption and its effects on the overlying glacier. Continue reading Iceland’s Monster Bares Its Heart