European Union News - Research & Innovation

The ECO2 project, pooling the resources of geologists, biologists, chemists, economists, social scientists and lawyers, is going to provide a comprehensive risk assessment and guidelines for monitoring sub-seabed CO2 storage. This research is targeting the implementation of carbon dioxide capture and storage (CCS) in the region and assessing the impact in the short and long term can lead this activity in marine ecosystems. Making the geological storage of carbon dioxide (CO2) environmentally safe is high on the priorities for the EU.

This year's European Week Against Cancer, which has been re-launched under the leadership of the Association of European Cancer Leagues as one of the activities of the European Partnership for Action Against Cancer, will focus on healthy living.

The discovery was made by an international team of EU-funded researchers conducting a planetary microlensing survey of the Milky Way galaxy. This implies implies that there could be billions more free-floating Jupiter-style planets floating in interstellar space far from the light of any nearby parent star. Although scientists supposed floating planets existed, due to their distant location, 10,000 to 20,000 light-years away from Earth, the planets had gone undetected until now.

The Galileo programme is the EU's initiative for a state-of-the-art global satellite navigation system, providing a highly accurate, guaranteed global positioning service under civilian control. The launch of the first two operational satellites of the EU's global navigation satellite system in October is the first of a series of launches due to take off from Europe's Space Port in Kourou, French Guiana.

Since 25 of May, new telecoms rules benefit citizens and businesses across Europe. New EU telecoms rules to ensure a more competitive telecoms sector and better services for customers are due to be implemented in national law by this date.

The research, led by the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and the pan-European team was made up of scientists from eight institutions from Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal and Sweden, received €2.5 million in EU funding. It is an innovative device, a new type of mammogram technique using molecular imaging which could help detect breast cancer earlier.

At the Council meeting on 12 May, EU's ministers for justice and home affairs agreed to promote the use of early flood warning systems such as the European Flood Alert System (EFAS) when discussing integrated flood management.

When Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull volcano erupted in 2010, air transport officials launched a no-fly zone. Thus, researchers from the University of Copenhagen in Denmark and the University of Iceland have created a protocol to give traffic authorities the help they need to quickly determine if planes should be grounded when ash threatens airspace safety.

The ELI ('Extreme light infrastructure') project, with European funds, aims to build a laser of intensity sufficient to rip photons into electron-positron pairs. This type of super laser could play a crucial role in the development of new cancer diagnosis and treatments, and could help fuel our understanding of molecular biology and nanoscience. It could also be used to resolve myriad issues that weigh heavily on the minds of environmentalists, like how to handle nuclear waste.

The study, presented by two researchers from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in the United States, has discovered how cells migrate at the developing brain stage and how other types of cells may travel inside the body. A critical stage of human development is how cells manage their migratory patterns in the human body. Another critical element is the process by which they differentiate or evolve from less specialised cells into more specialised cell types. According to researchers, bad coordination could trigger abnormal development, and in turn lead to cancer.