At a ceremony held in Paris recenlty, the biologist Edith Heard was handed the CNRS Gold Medal, one of the most prestigious French scientific distinctions, for her outstanding research on epigenetics and X-chromosome inactivation.
While very useful in ecosystems, mosquitoes tend to ruin the lives of humans. A CNRS team has even recently calculated how much these dipterans cost society, primarily due to the diseases they transmit.
Before going to school to learn how to read and write their language, children first manage to understand and then speak it. How are they able to do so, almost all of them spontaneously, without a teacher or instruction?
The only permanent bipeds of the animal kingdom alongside humans, birds have an extraordinary sense of balance. How do these direct descendants of the dinosaurs maintain this stability, especially when sleeping? Scientists recently succeeded in solving the...
The fossils of this primate, which were discovered in the early 2000s and date back 7 million years, remain the subject of intense debate, notably as to whether they should be considered part of the...
By depriving them more or less temporarily of their sense of smell, the Covid-19 pandemic made thousands of people abruptly realise the importance of their olfactory system. Research is now trying to...
Forests cover a third of the world's land surface. Although they provide us with invaluable services, they are now under so much pressure that we are faced with our own contradictions between...
For the past 20 years, this specialist in developmental and evolutionary biology has been passionately dedicated to studying a small fish that lives in the waters of Central America. So much so that...
Single-cell technologies for the analysis of genomic data enable scientists to better study tissue mechanisms and heterogeneity at the scale of a cell. They also generate masses of wide-ranging data...
Posture, behaviour, preparation… Everything that athletes do is of interest to science. For the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, the CNRS is pulling out all the stops to support the French competitors. The...
Numerous cellular phenomena are guided by mechanical forces, such as embryonic development or the spread of metastases. These phenomena are the subject of intense research aimed at understanding how...
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.