Should we rethink education to foster curiosity, creativity and competitiveness? At the last World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Sir Tim Hunt, member of the ERC Scientific Council and Nobel laureate in 2001 proposed some guidelines.

‘You will never become a scientist!’ For his teachers, a science career for John Gurdon, was no more than hypothetical. But the British professor who won the 2012 Nobel Prize for Medicine has only one piece of advice for aspiring researchers: ‘Don’t give up!’

They can burn and blister your skin, stop you from getting a mortgage, and even kill you. Plants and animals carried around the world by tourists and trade are costing the European Union over EUR 12 billion per year. Even these estimates are conservative as the data relates mostly to land-based invasive species.

How do you encourage civil servants to take a long, hard look at what they do so as to improve public services for citizens? And how do you kick-start new thinking to address society’s plague of problems? For a start, you need to discover users’ thoughts about basic design problems in the services they use, according to Danish political scientist Christian Bason.

Diabetes is on the rise all around the world. In the EU alone, there are 33 million people diagnosed with diabetes. They include people of all ages and from all walks of life. The two main forms are insulin-dependent Type-1 diabetes and non-insulin-dependent Type-2 diabetes. Type-1 diabetes, which develops mainly in children and adolescents, is more aggressive. However the disease is not a tragedy, as three ‘Type-1’ patients explain. 

Across the Atlantic, scientists are also making use of open access journals. In Canada, the national medical association started publishing a totally new, fully ‘open’ journal in January.

Economist and author Mariana Mazzucato argues that for innovation to flourish in Europe, its governments must become more entrepreneurial and invest in technologies that private investors consider too risky.

Professor Christian Keysers first saw the film Dr. No as a teenager. Watching the scene where James Bond wakes up to discover a large, hairy, poisonous spider crawling up his arm, he thought he could almost feel the spider on his own skin.

An experimental tablet treatment for child diabetes, where youngsters have traditionally had to inject themselves with sugar controlling insulin, could end up eradicating the disease altogether, according to the scientist leading the European NAIMIT project.

For scientists, packing up their lab coats and microscopes and heading to foreign laboratories can really pay dividends. Thanks to initiatives like Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowships, women are benefiting more and more from making a move abroad.