Catégorie : CNRS

nouvelle brève
31
Oct
2024
Posted in CNRS

When science enters the Chauvet Cave

Thirty years after its discovery, an exhibition at the Cité des sciences et de l’industrie in Paris is featuring the “scientific adventure” behind the Chauvet Cave. Carole Fritz, the exhibition curator, provides an overview.

nouvelle brève
30
Oct
2024
Posted in CNRS

How speech comes to children

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?

nouvelle brève
18
Oct
2024
Posted in CNRS

Infrasound, sound waves that nothing can stop

What do a wind turbine, an ocean swell, and a volcanic eruption have in common? All three emit infrasound, or sound whose frequency is below 20 hertz. These sound waves, which are wrongly considered to be inaudible, can travel around the Earth multiple…

nouvelle brève
16
Oct
2024
Posted in CNRS

How to speak to extraterrestrials?

Interview with the linguist Frédéric Landragin, who recently published a short guide on interstellar communication.

nouvelle brève
15
Oct
2024
Posted in CNRS

Why birds do not fall while sleeping

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…

nouvelle brève
14
Oct
2024
Posted in CNRS

Breathing life back into Antiquity

Cities, landscapes, monuments, even human figures: the watercolours of the architect and archaeologist Jean-Claude Golvin are an invitation to immerse ourselves in the everyday life of Greek, Roman, and Egyptian Antiquity.

nouvelle brève
11
Oct
2024
Posted in CNRS

Was Toumaï a biped?

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 human lineage.

nouvelle brève
08
Oct
2024
Posted in CNRS

Cultural property on the path to restitution

With the release of the documentary film Dahomey, which follows France’s restitution of twenty-six works of art to Benin, various research teams continue to work on the return of African cultural property to their communities of origin.

nouvelle brève
06
Sep
2024
Posted in CNRS

Nations in the line of sight of international law

As the International Criminal Court considers a request to issue an arrest warrant against Israel’s prime minister and three Hamas officials for crimes against humanity, Raphaëlle Nollez-Goldbach, a specialist in the subject, looks back on the very you…

nouvelle brève
03
Sep
2024
Posted in CNRS

A nose for smell disorders

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 decipher the causes of anosmia and to improve its tr…

nouvelle brève
30
Août
2024
Posted in CNRS

Planet 9, do you copy?

For nearly ten years, astronomers have been trying to demonstrate the existence of a massive object thought to be orbiting in the outer reaches of the Solar System. Although the hypothesis is widely debated, a recent study claims that the absence of su…

nouvelle brève
27
Août
2024
Posted in CNRS

Mai-Anh Ngo, sports and equal rights champion

Two weeks after the Olympic Games, Paris is hosting the 2024 Paralympics. A multi-medallist para-swimmer, France’s national karate kata champion in 2022 and a lawyer specialising in sports and disability law, Mai-Anh Ngo carried the Paralympic flame on…

nouvelle brève
27
Août
2024
Posted in CNRS

Mai-Anh Ngo, lawyer and “hyperactive PRM”

A multi-medallist para-swimmer, France’s national karate kata champion in 2022 and a lawyer specialising in sports and disability law, Mai-Anh Ngo will carry the Paralympic flame on 25 August.

nouvelle brève
21
Août
2024
Posted in CNRS

Marseille liberated!

Julia Pirotte, a photojournalist and resistance fighter, documented the first day of the Marseille uprising on 21 August, 1944, wielding her camera alongside the freedom fighters. Through her images, the historian Claire Miot recounts this little-known…

nouvelle brève
15
Août
2024
Posted in CNRS

Ancient Olympic fans also cheered for their heroes

As the 2024 Olympics in Paris have come to a close and the Paralympics are about to begin, the historian Jean-Paul Thuillier looks back at the origins of the games in Greco-Roman civilisation.

nouvelle brève
15
Août
2024
Posted in CNRS

Ancient Olympic fans also cheered for their heroes

As the 2024 Olympics in Paris have come to a close and the Paralympics are about to begin, the historian Jean-Paul Thuillier looks back at the origins of the games in Greco-Roman civilisation.

nouvelle brève
30
Juil
2024
Posted in CNRS

The call of the forest

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 their sometimes conflicting roles as sanctuaries for biodive…

nouvelle brève
26
Juil
2024
Posted in CNRS

Sylvie Rétaux, the all-terrain biologist

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 she took up speleology in order to explore deep caves…

nouvelle brève
23
Juil
2024
Posted in CNRS

Anthropology tracks the Invisible

Haunted houses, ghosts, spirits… From Mongolia to the United Kingdom, the anthropologist Grégory Delaplace investigates the various ways in which the dead manifest themselves to the living. He takes these “apparitions” seriously, refusing to prejudge w…

nouvelle brève
22
Juil
2024
Posted in CNRS

Largest-ever digital camera set to scan the Universe

It took hundreds of scientists worldwide, including several CNRS teams, to produce the world’s largest digital camera, the LSST (Legacy Survey of Space and Time), which has finally arrived in Chile. Mounted on the telescope at the Vera C. Rubin Observa…

nouvelle brève
18
Juil
2024
Posted in CNRS

Single-cell technologies mark the dawn of a new era

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 that takes cell biology into a new era.

nouvelle brève
11
Juil
2024
Posted in CNRS

Screening 20 years of far right activism in Europe

For the European research project FARPO (Far Right Protest Observatory), the political science researchers Caterina Froio and Pietro Castelli Gattinara are gathering and analysing data on the extra-parliamentary activism of far right parties and moveme…

nouvelle brève
11
Juil
2024
Posted in CNRS

Screening 20 years of far right activism in Europe

For the European research project FARPO (Far Right Protest Observatory), the political science researchers Caterina Froio and Pietro Castelli Gattinara are gathering and analysing data on the extra-parliamentary activism of far right parties and moveme…

nouvelle brève
09
Juil
2024
Posted in CNRS

Innovation hat trick

Cyril Aymonier, Lydéric Bocquet and Eleni Diamanti are the three recipients of the CNRS 2024 Innovation Medal, which rewards male and female scientists whose research has led to groundbreaking technological, therapeutic or social innovation.

nouvelle brève
28
Juin
2024
Posted in CNRS

Carbon sinks, our climate’s saving grace

Each year, some 40 billion tonnes of CO₂, one of the main greenhouse gases, are released into the atmosphere. A significant proportion of these is captured by the oceans, vegetation and the soil. The CNRS scientists are trying to better understand thes…

nouvelle brève
27
Juin
2024
Posted in CNRS

French-Chinese satellite to unlock the secrets of gamma-ray bursts

On 22 June, a Chinese Long March 2C rocket launched the SVOM satellite, carrying two French-designed instruments, into orbit. The mission’s goals are to investigate the mechanism of gamma-ray bursts and carry out indirect surveys of the intergalactic m…

nouvelle brève
25
Juin
2024
Posted in CNRS

Russian propaganda floods Europe’s social networks

As the European elections draw near, Paul Bouchaud, a specialist in algorithms, shows that Meta (the company that owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp) is not preventing pro-Russian propaganda from flooding its platforms with political messages.

nouvelle brève
20
Juin
2024
Posted in CNRS

Astronomy through the back door

Alessandro Morbidelli is a specialist in the evolution and formation of planetary systems, and holds the planetary formation Chair at the Collège de France. The astrophysicist looks back on his career, which has taken him from Italy to the origins of l…

nouvelle brève
14
Juin
2024
Posted in CNRS

Reaching for the Moon for the sake of humanity

The “Sanctuary on the Moon” project, launched nearly ten years ago, aims to send a collection of discs containing a vast body of knowledge and material evidence of human civilisation to the Moon.

nouvelle brève
10
Juin
2024
Posted in CNRS

The long-lost sarcophagus of Ramses II has finally been found

Solving a long-standing mystery, the sarcophagus of Ramses II has finally been identified based on a piece of granite discovered in Abydos, Egypt… in 2009. Recent analyses of the enigmatic fragment by the Egyptologist Frédéric Payraudeau confirm that i…

nouvelle brève
10
Juin
2024
Posted in CNRS

The long-lost sarcophagus of Ramses II has finally been found

Solving a long-standing mystery, the sarcophagus of Ramses II has finally been identified based on a piece of granite discovered in Abydos, Egypt… in 2009. Recent analyses of the enigmatic fragment by the Egyptologist Frédéric Payraudeau confirm that i…

nouvelle brève
06
Juin
2024
Posted in CNRS

The silent heroins of World War II

As the Allies commemorate the 80th anniversary of D-Day, the CNRS historian Denis Peschanski takes a look behind the scenes and celebrates the vital yet long-neglected role of women and foreigners in the French Resistance.

nouvelle brève
31
Mai
2024
Posted in CNRS

Sicilian fault under close surveillance

Off the coast of the Sicilian town of Catania, an oceanographic mission studied the activity of North ALFEO, a submarine fault discovered only a decade ago. In partnership with the French daily LeMonde.fr, this report takes you on board the Atalante to…

nouvelle brève
30
Mai
2024
Posted in CNRS

Enter the matrices!

Whether it is performed by humans or computers, matrix multiplication is a tiresome task. Researchers are striving to reduce the time and number of steps required to solve such operations.

nouvelle brève
29
Mai
2024
Posted in CNRS

Is CO2 capture the key to carbon neutrality?

The European Commission is adamant: carbon capture and storage (CCS) will play a key role in the fight against climate change. But just how does CCS work? How widespread is this technology? And what obstacles stand in its way? CNRS News takes a closer …

nouvelle brève
27
Mai
2024
Posted in CNRS

When science breaks Olympic records

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 goal is to fine-tune their performance and help them …