Making sense of science
Professor Mehdi Beniddir, both a researcher in chemistry and a pharmacist, explains how pharmacognosy makes it possible to develop new medicinal drugs from substances found in nature.
Article
05.16.2024
A massive asteroid struck the Earth 66 million years ago, dramatically affecting marine and terrestrial environments, and causing the mass extinction of numerous animal and plant species. The sebecosuchians, a highly-adaptable group of reptiles belonging to...
Slideshow
04.26.2024
In March 2020, France was one of the countries that adopted the strictest lockdown measures in an attempt to curb the Covid-19 pandemic. The historian and sociologist Nicolas Mariot looks back at this experiment in mass obedience.
Article
04.26.2024
Article
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...
Article
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...
Article
12.04.2017
The first results of the Microscope experiment have just been unveiled. Its objective is to test the equivalence principle, which states that in a vacuum, all bodies fall with the same speed....
Article
10.16.2017
A series of observations on an unprecedented scale combining detection of gravitational waves and electromagnetic signals at all wavelengths sheds light on unsolved mysteries of astrophysics.
10.13.2017

50 years ago, on October 13, 1967, the second—the unit of time—was no longer defined by stars, but by atoms. In this quest for precision, scientists are now inventing the clocks of the future,...

Article
09.12.2017
In the 20 years since it left Earth for Saturn, the Cassini-Huygens mission has made remarkable discoveries, to the point of changing our entire understanding of the Solar System. Its spectacular end...