Making sense of science
Thirty years after its discovery, an exhibition at the Cité des sciences et de l’industrie in Paris is featuring the “scientific adventure” behind the Chauvet Cave. Carole Fritz, the exhibition curator, provides an overview.
Article
10.31.2024
Before going to school to learn how to read and write their language, children first manage to understand and then speak it. How are they able to do so, almost all of them spontaneously, without a teacher or instruction?
Article
10.30.2024
What do a wind turbine, an ocean swell, and a volcanic eruption have in common? All three emit infrasound, or sound whose frequency is below 20 hertz. These sound waves, which are wrongly considered to be inaudible, can travel around the Earth multiple times...
Article
10.18.2024
10.16.2024
Interview with the linguist Frédéric Landragin, who recently published a short guide on interstellar communication.
Article
10.15.2024
The only permanent bipeds of the animal kingdom alongside humans, birds have an extraordinary sense of balance. How do these direct descendants of the dinosaurs maintain this stability, especially when sleeping? Scientists recently succeeded in solving the...
Article
10.14.2024
Cities, landscapes, monuments, even human figures: the watercolours of the architect and archaeologist Jean-Claude Golvin are an invitation to immerse ourselves in the everyday life of Greek, Roman, and Egyptian Antiquity.
Article
10.11.2024
The fossils of this primate, which were discovered in the early 2000s and date back 7 million years, remain the subject of intense debate, notably as to whether they should be considered part of the human lineage.
Article
10.08.2024
With the release of the documentary film Dahomey, which follows France’s restitution of twenty-six works of art to Benin, various research teams continue to work on the return of African cultural...
Article
09.06.2024
As the International Criminal Court considers a request to issue an arrest warrant against Israel’s prime minister and three Hamas officials for crimes against humanity, Raphaëlle Nollez-Goldbach, a...
Article
09.03.2024
By depriving them more or less temporarily of their sense of smell, the Covid-19 pandemic made thousands of people abruptly realise the importance of their olfactory system. Research is now trying to...
Article
08.30.2024
For nearly ten years, astronomers have been trying to demonstrate the existence of a massive object thought to be orbiting in the outer reaches of the Solar System. Although the hypothesis is widely...
Article
08.27.2024
Two weeks after the Olympic Games, Paris is hosting the 2024 Paralympics. A multi-medallist para-swimmer, France’s national karate kata champion in 2022 and a lawyer specialising in sports and...
Article
08.20.2024
Julia Pirotte, a photojournalist and resistance fighter, documented the first day of the Marseille uprising on 21 August, 1944, wielding her camera alongside the freedom fighters. Through her images...
Article
08.15.2024
As the 2024 Olympics in Paris have come to a close and the Paralympics are about to begin, the historian Jean-Paul Thuillier looks back at the origins of the games in Greco-Roman civilisation.
Article
07.30.2024
Forests cover a third of the world's land surface. Although they provide us with invaluable services, they are now under so much pressure that we are faced with our own contradictions between...
Article
07.23.2024
For the past 20 years, this specialist in developmental and evolutionary biology has been passionately dedicated to studying a small fish that lives in the waters of Central America. So much so that...
Article
07.22.2024
Haunted houses, ghosts, spirits… From Mongolia to the United Kingdom, the anthropologist Grégory Delaplace investigates the various ways in which the dead manifest themselves to the living. He takes...
Article
07.17.2024
Single-cell technologies for the analysis of genomic data enable scientists to better study tissue mechanisms and heterogeneity at the scale of a cell. They also generate masses of wide-ranging data...
Slideshow
07.12.2024
It took hundreds of scientists worldwide, including several CNRS teams, to produce the world’s largest digital camera, the LSST (Legacy Survey of Space and Time), which has finally arrived in Chile....