Marthe Gautier was the scientist behind the discovery of the supernumerary chromosome of trisomy 21, a genetic anomaly that affects some 50,000 people in France. Yet her work was overshadowed and she was not the one who took the credit. The biologist Julie Batut joins us for a look back at the career of this marginalised pioneer.
Since 2018, the Trump administration has been waging a trade war through successive hikes in customs duties. Has this policy protected the American economy? Researchers argue that, by fuelling...
Why do some people keep smoking, even when a close one has fallen seriously ill because of tobacco? A recent study questions the effectiveness of prevention policies.
Perusing through a million matrimonial ads from the past hundred years or so reveals changes in the criteria for love over the 20th century, and hint at deeper transformations in societies themselves.
Sophie Germain’s name will soon be engraved on the Eiffel Tower. A brilliant self-taught mathematician, she had to fight throughout her life to gain equal recognition to her male contemporaries, and...
Maïmouna Bocoum, a physicist specialising in acousto-optics at the Paris-based Langevin Institute, develops imaging technologies for the early detection of breast tumours. She was awarded this year’s...
The international crisis over Greenland has highlighted the wealth of the Far North's underground resources, but at the same time obscured the role of its inhabitants in their extraction. All...
Imagining and preparing for the future in order to guide research and public policy is the very purpose of foresight. A perilous exercise, scientists point out. And one that requires dialogue between...
Given that animals are sentient, as established by recent research, what is their attitude towards death? In a recently-published book, the biologist Emmanuelle Pouydebat sheds light on the complex...
In 2015, the historic Paris Agreement, signed by 195 countries, sought to limit global warming to 2 °C. Ten years later, the results have yet to materialise, raising questions regarding the...
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...
In the French-Belgian film "The Residence", recently released in a number of European countries and Brazil, a novelist interacts with an artificial intelligence system. The robotics...