Flying an airplane into a thunderstorm may not sound like a good idea. Unless you are a physicist. Scientists from the Exaedre project have led an exceptional mission to study the physics of lightning from up close.
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03.22.2019
In Iraqi Kurdistan, excavations carried out by a French archaeological mission have revealed an ancient city on the site of Kunara. Towards the end of the 3rd millennium BC, this city stood in the heart of an unknown kingdom: that of the mountain people, who...
Article
03.19.2019
In his new book, the physicist Sébastien Balibar tells the story of the encounter in Paris of the Hungarian László Tisza and the German Fritz London, two scientists who fled Nazism, and their subsequent exile to the United States. He shows how scientific...
Article
03.18.2019
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02.25.2019
Will Europe take part in the next space mission to Uranus and Neptune? To discuss the issues and technical questions that such a mission entails, Olivier Mousis, a specialist in planetary formation,...
01.22.2019
ERCcOMICS, a European communications project initiated to promote science to the general public, was featured at the 46th Angoulême International Comics Festival. Many comics were printed for the...
11.14.2018
After having received the Gruber Prize in Cosmology last May, the astrophysicist Jean-Loup Puget, emeritus senior researcher at the CNRS, was awarded the Shaw Prize in Astronomy on September 26 in...
Article
10.17.2018
Known since antiquity, Mercury has not yet delivered all its secrets. The international mission BepiColombo will study the planet's surface and compare its magnetic field with that of the Earth.
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
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...
Article
07.02.2018
The Sun is one of the final unknown frontiers in our Solar System. This August, a probe was launched to observe this star in unprecedented detail, and closer than ever before. The objective is to...
Article
05.21.2018
The quirky behavior of an asteroid that goes against the flow of most other celestial bodies in our Solar System prompted a French-Brazilian scientific duo to delve into its origins. And discover an...
05.09.2018
The world's most reflective mirrors, which reflect 99.9999% of incident light, were developed by a French laboratory. Discover the manufacturing secrets of these essential components of...
Article
05.02.2018
The InSight international space mission which launched May 5 from California successfully landed on the surface of the Red Planet on November 26. By studying for the first time the seismic waves on...
Article
01.12.2018
With their small size of several tens of centimeters and relatively low cost, nanosatellites—known as “CubeSats”—open up new scientific vistas. PicSat, launched on January 12, will be the first such...
12.14.2017
On December 14, 2017, Alain Brillet and Thibault Damour received the CNRS Gold Medal, France's highest scientific distinction, during a ceremony at the Collège de France in Paris. Together, the...