A million years ago, long before mass tourism, the Mediterranean islands were home to dwarf elephants. Although tiny when compared to their ancestors, these animals may have inspired the Greek myth of the Cyclopes.
Article
10.05.2026
Virtual globes, 2D or 3D representations of the world produced from digital data, can fool us into thinking that we now know everything there is to know about the Earth. But a deluge of data is no guarantee of a better picture of “reality”.
Slideshow
09.25.2026
A governing equation in quantum mechanics, the Schrödinger equation is, in practice, impossible to solve exactly. The mathematicians Éric Cancès, Mathieu Lewin, and Julien Toulouse have now proposed a radical reformulation of it, in order to study complex...
Article
09.22.2026
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Article
06.29.2026
In April, the researchers involved in the French-Chinese SVOM space mission presented an update on its initial findings. These provided a number of interesting insights into events that took place in...
04.23.2026
The Ramses mission to asteroid Apophis is set to launch in 2028. It forms the cornerstone of a planetary defence programme designed to protect our planet from the risk of collision with near-Earth...
Article
01.16.2026
One hundred years after the death of the French astronomer and populariser of science Camille Flammarion, the CNRS physicist Jean-Philippe Uzan follows in the footsteps of his predecessor’s...
Article
11.03.2025
On 14 September, 2015, the international LIGO/Virgo collaboration detected the very first gravitational wave signal, a tiny distortion of spacetime predicted by Einstein, in this case produced by the...
Article
10.09.2025
Why is the outermost part of the Sun's atmosphere, the corona, so much hotter than its surface? Ten years after formulating a hypothesis based on a numerical model, CNRS researchers have now...
Article
09.12.2025
With large-scale observation campaigns, innovative data analysis methods and theoretical advances on all fronts, astrophysics and cosmology are entering a high-precision era with the potential to...
Article
07.09.2025
During his “miraculous year” 120 years ago, Albert Einstein explained the photoelectric effect, laying the foundations of quantum mechanics. The historian of science Christian Bracco provides an...
03.18.2025
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 have been lighting up European skies up until...
Article
02.06.2025
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...
01.29.2025
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.
01.20.2025
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...
Article
12.04.2024
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...