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, mosquitos 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.
Decoding the genomes of 4,500 marine species is the goal of scientists working on the Atlasea programme. Join them on a fishing expedition in Dinard, Brittany.
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 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.
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 mystery.
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 treatment.
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 biodiversity, or (over)logged sources of materials.
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 in Mexico, where she can observe it in its natural environment.
