At the Musée de l’Homme anthropology museum in Paris, an exhibition traces the movements of Homo sapiens across the long history of humanity. To address this complex topic, often the subject of fanciful representations, the scientific curators approached it from multiple points of view, including...
The metabolism of astronauts, the behaviour of plants, the reactions of living beings to radiation and of foams to weightlessness… The International Space Station does not only observe Space, as evidenced by the following four experiments.
How to measure the dislocation of ice floes, the immense expanses of ice floating in polar seas? Easy! Create a model of the ice pack, find the best way to shake it, and watch as it breaks under the effect of waves.
Over the past few months, our planet has been ìmpacted by intense solar flare activity on the Sun. This phenomenon, which caused the polar auroras that recently lit up European skies, could also disrupt a number of industries. To better predict such solar...
The actress Hedy Lamarr died 25 years ago. A brilliant inventor, she devised a system for encoding data transmissions that became widely used in telecommunications. But for decades, history has remembered her only as a Hollywood movie star. As the world...
Researchers submitted various scenarios to three chatbots, including ChatGPT, to see whether they took human values into account in their answers to questions.
White dwarfs are the extremely dense, compact remnants of stars that have ended their lives, and are at the origin of tremendous explosions known as novae. This phenomenon (not to be confused with supernovae, which destroy the star) is thought to be the...
Researchers have developed the world’s first index evaluating prison conditions, attesting to the enforcement – or more often the violation – of the fundamental rights of inmates. The results for...
Based in Namibia, the H.E.S.S. telescope array monitors the showers of particles produced when the highest-energy cosmic rays ever observed in the Universe impact the Earth's atmosphere.
Are the dinosaurs in “Jurassic Park” realistic? How does the film franchise explore the impact and applications of science? These are some of the topics addressed in a book published last autumn, as...
Ten years after the terrorist attack against Charlie Hebdo, the legal expert Thomas Hochmann points out the difficulty of regulating freedom of expression without veering into censorship, especially...
Astronomical observatories can yield exceptional discoveries, but they are sometimes built with little regard for the environment and local people, sparking public opposition. The sociologist and...
As a remake of the 1922 film Nosferatu was recently released, the sociologist Arnaud Esquerre takes a new look at the vampire – a figure that, from its emergence in the 18th century to the present...
Light, soft, resistant, deformable, and sometimes tacky, knitted fabric is not just an everyday object, it is also a metamaterial whose extraordinary properties are of great interest to physicists.
At a ceremony held in Paris recenlty, the biologist Edith Heard was handed the CNRS Gold Medal, one of the most prestigious French scientific distinctions, for her outstanding research on epigenetics...
Over 5 million years ago, the Mediterranean Sea dried up, giving way to a salt flat stretching as far as the eye could see. A look back at the Mediterranean basin’s last great hydrological crisis.
A genuine technological gem, the James Webb Space Telescope has been exploring the smallest nooks of the Universe over the last two years. From the birth of planets and the first galaxies to the...
As indicators of the degradation of permafrost – permanently frozen soil – in mountainous areas, molards are receiving special focus from researchers. In his laboratory in Caen (northwestern France...
While very useful in ecosystems, mosquitoes tend to ruin the lives of humans. A CNRS team has even recently calculated how much these dipterans cost society, primarily due to the diseases they...