As Europe pursues its goal of becoming the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world, it is seeking to develop the infrastructure needed to power the next generation of Grid technologies.

Grid technologies connect computers and scientific instruments, bringing together users from around the world and from different companies in a single, 'virtual' organisation. In turn, members of this virtual organisation can share knowledge instantly and easily access and store shared data.

The European Commission is now on the road to creating the first ever Europe-wide public-private partnerships to boost research and development, having adopted proposals for initiatives in two strategic industrial sectors.

The Commission presented two Joint Technology Initiatives (JTIs), worth approximately €5 billion, on embedded computing systems, to be known as ARTEMIS (Advanced Research and Technology for Embedded Intelligence and Systems), and on innovative medicines (Innovative Medicines Initiative).

Integration of health monitoring tools into textiles brings the benefits of safety and comfort to the users. Instrumented clothes will provide remote monitoring of vitals signs, diagnostics to improve early illness detection and metabolic disorder and benefits to the reduction on medical social costs to the citizen. Ambulatory healthcare, isolated people, convalescent people and patients with chronic diseases are addressed.

It's not easy to keep absolutely still in the 'bore' during a magnetic resonance imaging examination – yet even the tiniest motion can distort the results. The PROMO optical recognition system compensates for such errors.

The patient lies in the bore, keeping as still as he can - but he finds it very hard to remain immobile for so long. If he moves too much, he risks causing errors - known by experts as artifacts - in the magnetic resonance image.

The EU should be seen as an advocate and example of international collaboration in research and development, according to a new report from the think tanks Demos and The Centre.

The report, "The Atlas of Ideas", is the outcome of an 18-month study. It charts the rise of innovation in China, India and South Korea, and sets out four key recommendations on how the EU could best respond to the challenges posed by these countries.

European Health Commissioner Markos Kyprianou presented the results of the recent consultation on health services to the Informal Health Council in Aachen, Germany on 20 April. The results show that most contributors favour some form of EU action on health services, combining both legislative elements and practical support for cooperation between European health systems.

Contributors saw a need for better information to patients to enable informed choices about cross-border care and greater clarity about the procedures to follow, with a broad consensus that quality and safety of healthcare should be ensured by the country where treatment is provided.

The increasing convergence of biology, medicine and genetics provides an opportunity to leverage synergies between the three areas for the benefit of health. Biology and genetics are emerging as information sciences while medicine is increasingly adopting information systems and informatics approaches to support healthcare delivery.