The European Commission has proposed that 2012 be designated as the "European Year for Active Ageing". The initiative aims to help create better job opportunities and working conditions for the growing numbers of older people in Europe, help them take an active role in society and encourage healthy ageing.

EU researchers will have sustainable and continuous access to the combined processing power of over 200,000 desktop computers in more than 30 European countries thanks to the European Commission funded European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) project.

Detection of circulating and disseminated tumor cells in blood is a promising methodology to diagnose cancer dissemination or to follow up cancer patients during therapy.

The consortium of the project "European Network for Cell Imaging and Tracking Expertise" (ENCITE) has the ambitious mission to develop and test new MR and optical imaging methods and biomarkers to draw a more comprehensive picture of cell fate and the reaction of the immune system.

The Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (K.U.Leuven) released an extension for OpenOffice.org Writer that enables users to save documents as Braille or to send them directly to a Braille embosser. "odt2braille" is a freeware extension for OpenOffice.org, a office suite that is freely available for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux/Unix and Solaris.

More than 4000 people die in the EU each year because of accidents caused by fire and many thousands more are hospitalised to receive treatment for burns. Thanks to EU-funded research, medical experts will be able to more quickly identify the harmful bacteria or fungus which may be lurking in the wounds of burn victims and causing an infection, speeding up the diagnostic and healing process by days.

Each year 350,000 new cases of breast cancer are detected in the European Union, but a lack of effective technology to assist in cases that are difficult to diagnose means some cases go undetected or are incorrectly diagnosed.