Nom Machine
journal

Meet Arthur, the first deep-sea robot archaeologist

Arthur is a new submersible ROV (remotely-operated vehicle) designed for underwater archaeology. Offering unprecedented performance and versatility, it is able to explore shipwrecks for treasure and the marine life they harbour, at depths as great as 2500 metres. CNRS News talks to roboticist Vincent Creuze about this innovative deep-sea robot.

Downloading the human mind

In "Mickey 17", the latest film by the South Korean director Bong Joon-ho, the main character is recruited as an “Expendable” as part of a mission to colonise an exoplanet. Each time he dies, his memories are reloaded into a new body. Can this technique actually become a reality?

Antifungals and antibiotics have identical resistance mechanisms

Mycoses resistant to antifungal drugs are on the increase. Not least because treatments against pathogenic fungi are used in agriculture as well as in human and animal health.

A 300,000-year melting pot

At the Musée de l’Homme anthropology museum in Paris, an exhibition traces the movements of Homo sapiens across the long history of humanity. To address this complex topic, often the subject of fanciful representations, the scientific curators approached it from multiple points of view, including research and art, but also purely human.

Space experiments aboard the ISS

The metabolism of astronauts, the behaviour of plants, the reactions of living beings to radiation and of foams to weightlessness… The International Space Station does not only observe Space, as evidenced by the following four experiments.

Solar storms ahead

Over the past few months, our planet has been ìmpacted by intense solar flare activity on the Sun. This phenomenon, which caused the polar auroras that recently lit up European skies, could also disrupt a number of industries. To better predict such solar storms, scientists are hard at work developing the emerging discipline of space weather.

When beauty overshadows scientific genius

The actress Hedy Lamarr died 25 years ago. A brilliant inventor, she devised a system for encoding data transmissions that became widely used in telecommunications. But for decades, history has remembered her only as a Hollywood movie star. As the world celebrates International Women’s Day this month, two women scientists provide an insight into her inventions and their impact in later years.

AI needs to align with human values

Researchers submitted various scenarios to three chatbots, including ChatGPT, to see whether they took human values into account in their answers to questions.

Those stars that come and go

White dwarfs are the extremely dense, compact remnants of stars that have ended their lives, and are at the origin of tremendous explosions known as novae. This phenomenon (not to be confused with supernovae, which destroy the star) is thought to be the source of the excess lithium in the Universe.

On the trail of cosmic cataclysms

Based in Namibia, the H.E.S.S. telescope array monitors the showers of particles produced when the highest-energy cosmic rays ever observed in the Universe impact the Earth's atmosphere.