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Matter
Wood, stone, iron and lead: what do we know about the materials used to build Notre-Dame and the construction techniques employed at the time? Should they be replicated? And which tests that were previously impossible to carry out are now within reach?
Article
12.21.2019
Invisible, and yet everywhere. Mercury is present in the atmosphere, oceans, and even in our plates! Since the adoption of the Minamata Convention on Mercury in 2013, 128 countries have been striving to limit the spread of this pollutant. However, the complex...
Slideshow
12.13.2019
The great organ, which was partially spared by the fire, is not the only thing that resounds within Notre-Dame. CNRS researchers are trying to reconstruct the cathedral's sound environment during different periods, providing a resource for assessing the...
Article
12.03.2019
Fifty years after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin's historic moonwalk, scientific instruments deployed on the Moon's surface continue to supply valuable data to scientists. Using these reflectors still in place on the Moon's surface, a team of researchers and...
Video
11.25.2019
See also
Article
11.25.2019
On Tuesday November 26, Thomas Ebbesen was awarded the CNRS Gold Medal, one of France's highest scientific distinctions. The author of several groundbreaking discoveries, the French-Norwegian...
11.20.2019
About 90% of the digital information that exists today was created in the past two years. Finding new materials able to capture this expanding digital world—and that are less energy-hungry—has...
11.19.2019
What if we could power our vehicles with metal powder? Aluminium and magnesium have the same energy density as fossil fuels and the waste—metal oxydes—can be recycled with concentrated solar...
Opinion
11.14.2019
This year, the world will produce 360 million tons of plastics. From their disposal in the environment to implications on human health, this has become a major societal issue. The chemists and...
11.13.2019
Creating a Google Earth of sorts for the cathedral of Paris, that is the ambitious project of a team of researchers. Their objective is clear: to gather all past and future knowledge about the...
10.24.2019
To study neutrinos, some the most elusive particles known to physics, an international team of researchers and engineers are building an ambitious detector called KM3NeT at the bottom of the...
06.21.2019
Long a simple physicist's idea, the quantum computer, which promises to revolutionise computing, is increasingly becoming a tangible reality. The first machines able to surpass traditional...
06.17.2019
Since the fire that ravaged Notre Dame Cathedral on 15 April, many scientists have volunteered their expertise to aid in its restoration. We talked to Philippe Dillmann and Martine Regert, leaders of...
06.06.2019
For reasons that actually have little to do with their abundance, the problems linked to the supply of what are known as "rare" earths could slow the environmental transition. Chemistry can...