A French-Dutch team has reconstructed the evolution of the Central Asian steppe over the past 40 million years. This turbulent history, made up of major upheavals and mass extinctions, today serves as a warning: a new environmental crisis could irreversibly turn the region into a desert.
As mobile operators offer the first 5G subscriptions to the general public, this new standard for telecommunications raises doubts and resistance. The CNRS senior researcher Philippe Owezarski presents the issues involved.
Medicine, civil engineering, telecommunications, natural resources management... Quantum sensors offering both unique sensitivity and accuracy are about to revolutionise detection in a number of fields.
Last October, as a fresh eruption broke out on Mount Etna, an unprecedented marine expedition was underway just a few kilometres from the volcano. Its goal was to gain a better understanding of the processes at work at a major submarine seismic fault, using a...
A unique collection of sound archives of rare and endangered languages is now accessible to all on the Pangloss website. Several thousand tales and stories in more than 170 languages, collected and documented by dedicated linguists, are now available in audio...
Will hydrogen be the foundation for the clean energy of the future? Daniel Hissel, who was awarded the 2020 CNRS Gold Medal, provides an overview of existing capabilities, as well as present challenges.
Loss of smell, one of the effects of Covid-19, has a real impact on people's social lives, who sometimes suffer from isolation or depression. Three specialists share their insight and call for...
Despite their size, weighing as much as hundreds of kilos, bluefin tuna are difficult to study. Researchers have developed instruments to monitor these animals’ migrations as well as various...
On the night of 5-6 December, a very special package landed in the South Australian desert region of Woomera. It contained samples of dust brought back from asteroid Ryugu, after a long journey by...
In 2018, the biggest seismic tremor ever recorded in the region of Mayotte, a French territory in the Indian Ocean, triggered a gripping scientific investigation that resulted in the discovery that a...
In a new book, Luc Arrondel and Richard Duhautois, researchers at the Paris School of Economics (PSE) and the CNAM, respectively, tackle the issue of unequal pay between women and men in the world of...
The artificial neuron she created caused a stir. Now she is set to develop processors inspired by the functioning of the brain. A portrait of spintronics specialist Julie Grollier.
Can capitalism be virtuous? Fairer and greener? What if innovation, made compatible with a system of social protection, were the only way out of the current crisis? This is the idea put forth by...
DNA analysis has revealed that, between 150,000 and 350,000 years ago, the Y chromosome of the Neanderthals was totally replaced by that of a population from which Homo sapiens is descended.
A network of cells that can learn and adapt...and all this without a brain! The Blob continues to fascinate scientists like Audrey Dussutour, who has studied it for years. She hopes that it will...
New mathematical tools have improved our ability to interpret the information contained in ancient DNA samples. Bioinformaticians have developed a model that can visualise the migrations and gene...
The MISTRALS research programme, set up under the auspices of the CNRS, is finally coming to an end after ten years of activity. It has enabled more than 1000 scientists from 23 countries to study...
No fewer than 180 candidate vaccines against Covid-19 are being developed around the world and 40 are currently in clinical trials. How do these vaccines work? And how can we measure their...