In northern Jordan, a Roman-era painted tomb has been unearthed by the Department of Antiquities. An extraordinary document of religious, political, and social history that three historians and epigraphists have had an opportunity to examine, and are striving to interpret.
Article
09.21.2018
Can social phenomena be described by mathematical laws? In his recent book, the physicist Pablo Jensen warns against the temptation of modeling everything, which—following our increasing reliance on big data and algorithms—seems to increasingly push us to...
Article
09.19.2018
From South America to Asia, from Akhenaten to Marcel Proust, here is an overview of the different research for conserving, protecting, and reconstructing our shared heritage.
Slideshow
09.18.2018
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Article
09.12.2018
Nine crisscrossed lines on a 73,000-year-old South African rock fragment have emerged as the world’s earliest-known drawing following a scientific study into how they were originally traced.
09.10.2018
Is science doing enough to help protect the environment? Following a detailed analysis of 13,000 publications on the subject, the answer is yes. A retort to those who believe that conservation biology, a discipline that studies biodiversity and offers...
09.06.2018
One day, our superhuman bodies, augmented with memory implants and infrared eyesight, will stop ageing. And we will never die, our conscience uploaded to heavenly clouds of bits and bytes, floating endlessly in the transhumanist fantasy that we are creating....
09.03.2018
Machines will one day be able to carry out all tasks currently performed by humans. We asked the economist Gilles Saint-Paul to describe six possible futures for the 22nd century.
08.31.2018
In Greenland, French and Quebec-based researchers are monitoring the impact of climate change. Their clues consist of various marine creatures such as bivalves and shell-based mollusks, whose growth...
Article
08.28.2018
Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, the pioneering science-fiction novel that went on to become a universal myth, is the subject of a romantic period-drama that hit movie theaters this Summer. Did...
08.23.2018
Chemists, historians and conservators are seeking to preserve—and possibly one day exhibit—extremely fragile prints by Louis Ducos du Hauron, the little-known pioneer of color photography and whose...
Article
08.21.2018
Identified in Drosophila (fruit fly) more than 70 years ago, the Polycomb and Trithorax proteins have recently been found to act as essential regulators of the expression of our genes. We look back...
08.14.2018
Although its existence has been suspected for more than seventy years, the hunt for dark matter continues, as physicists around the world attempt to track it down. Or are they all just chasing an...
Article
08.13.2018
In English the word is ‘secular,’ but the French equivalent ‘laïque,’ which features prominently in the opening paragraph of the French constitution has a different meaning to the French today. The...
08.09.2018
Can human development continue at this pace without causing a loss of biodiversity? A group of researchers at the French Institute of Pondicherry believes so. By studying the impact of human...
Article
08.01.2018
The Italian mathematician Alessio Figalli, 34 years old, with over a hundred scientific publications to his name, has just won the most prestigious prize in mathematics, the Fields Medal. We asked...
Article
07.31.2018
France took its place at the renowned plenary lectures of the International Congress of Mathematicians held in August in Brazil, during which the Fields Medal winners were announced.
Article
07.30.2018
The initial data gathered by the instrument GRAVITY, for a star near the giant black hole located at the center of our galaxy, confirms the predictions of general relativity in the most extreme...
07.25.2018
Brain imaging grants access to new information that may potentially be used by judiciary systems around the world. Yet it is essential to avoid overinterpretation of such data. In France, a 2011...
Article
07.21.2018
Mounting populism, Brexit, a looming trade crisis with the United States… How will the current tensions within the European Union transform its economic, social and political landscape? This was the...