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The ocean's capacity to store atmospheric carbon dioxide is some 20% greater than the estimates contained in the latest IPCC report 1 . These are the findings of a study to be published in the journal Nature on December 6, 2023, led by an international team including a biologist from the CNRS 2 . The scientists looked at the role played by plankton in the natural transport of carbon from surface waters down to the seabed.

Galactic winds enable the exchange of matter between galaxies and their surroundings. In this way, they limit the growth of galaxies, that is, their star formation rate. Although this had already been observed in the local universe, an international research team led by a CNRS scientist 1   has just revealed-using MUSE, 2  an instrument integrated into the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) Very Large Telescope-the existence of the phenomenon in galaxies which are more than 7 billion years old and actively forming stars, the category to which most galaxies belong.

In the spring, Alpine glaciers sometimes don a sheer red or orangish veil. Known as 'red snow' or 'blood snow', this phenomenon is caused by the blooming of Sanguina nivaloides , a microscopic alga. Scientists from the CNRS, the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), Météo-France, INRAE, and Université Grenoble Alpes 1 turned their attention to this organism, which forms the pillar of a snowy ecosystem still poorly understood.

The largest floating ice shelves in the polar ice sheet have lost more than a third of their volume since 1978.

A team led by CNRS scientists 1  has discovered that, just like humans, Guinea baboons develop complex strategies to select partners for cooperation, basing their decisions on past interactions. Humans naturally engage in strategic cooperation in many contexts. For example, when children help schoolmates by lending them their class notes, they may expect the same in return the next time: this is known as reciprocity.

Before modern humans settled definitively in Europe, other human populations left Africa for Europe beginning approximately 60,000 years ago, albeit without settling for the long term. This was due to a major climatic crisis 40,000 years ago, combined with a super-eruption originating from the Phlegraean Fields volcanic area near current-day Naples, subsequently precipitating a decline in ancient European populations.

As social animals, humans communicate with and influence each other by leaving digital traces on the Internet, particularly by using star rating systems on collaborative platforms. Many e-commerce sites use this technique to allow users to share their hotel or restaurant experiences, for example. But under what conditions can these traces enable a group to cooperate, and can we trust them?

The mystery of the Mona Lisa lies not so much in her smile as in the painting techniques used by Leonardo da Vinci. Artist, engineer and architect, da Vinci was also an experimental chemist, with the Mona Lisa being his veritable laboratory.

Pulsars, small, very dense dead stars, emit electromagnetic radiation in the form of beams that sweep through space at regular intervals, rather like cosmic lighthouses. Now, recent observations of one of the nearest pulsars to Earth, the Vela pulsar, have caused a major stir in the scientific community: radiation around 200 times more energetic than any previously detected from this source has been detected at the H.E.S.S.

Thanks to the latest catalog from ESA's Gaia satellite, an international team, led by astronomers from Observatoire de Paris - PSL and CNRS, obtains the most accurate measurement of the Milky Way's mass. The subject of an article published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics on September 27, 2023, this study opens the way to important questions in cosmology, particularly on the relative amount of dark matter contained in our Galaxy.

Polysiloxanes, the scientific name for silicones, possess exceptional properties, and are used in numerous fields ranging from cosmetics to aerospace. They are absolutely everywhere! However, small cyclic oligosiloxanes impurities - including substances classified as toxic for the environment and identified as potential endocrine disruptors - can form during their synthesis.

Scientists have discovered fossil evidence of a cyclical climate on Mars, with wet and dry seasons like those on Earth. This environment, in which simple organic molecules have already been discovered, may have provided ideal conditions for the formation of complex organic compounds. This work opens up new prospects for research into the processes underlying the origin of life, of which no vestiges remain on Earth.

Whereas humans or sheep cause blockages when evacuating through a narrow opening, gregarious fish evacuate without blockage, seeking to maintain as much social distance between individuals as possible. This is the experimental result just obtained by Grenoble-based scientists from the Laboratoire interdisciplinaire de physique (Liphy - UGA/CNRS) and the Laboratoire de psychologie et neurocognition (LPNC - UGA/CNRS).

Contrary to prior assumptions, ancient Egyptian painters did at times push the boundaries of convention. Artistic creations supposed to be copies of canonical images were in fact often adapted and reworked during their execution. This discovery was made using new, portable chemical imaging tools that leave the artworks intact.

Babies and puppies have at least two things in common: aside from being newborns, they promote a positive emotional state in human mothers, leading them to articulate better when they speak. This finding is the result of research by an international team 1 that included Alejandrina Cristia, a CNRS Researcher at the Laboratoire de sciences cognitives et psycholinguistique (LSCP) (CNRS/EHESS/ENS-PSL).

An international team of scientists has discovered that Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*) 1 , the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way, emerged from a long period of dormancy some 200 years ago. The team, led by Frédéric Marin 2 , a CNRS researcher at the Astronomical Strasbourg Observatory (CNRS/University of Strasbourg), has revealed the past awakening of this gigantic object, which is four million times more massive than the Sun.

For the first time ever, a molecule able to prevent the invasion of blood cells by parasites of the genus Plasmodium , responsible for malaria, has been identified and described by CNRS scientists, * in collaboration with American and English colleagues. Their findings, which have just been published in Nature Communications, confirm the key role that myosin A-the 'molecular motor' of Plasmodium -plays in their infiltration of human hosts and penetration of their red blood cells, which triggers malarial attacks.

  Dark matter remains a scientific mystery: it makes up 26% of our Universe's total energy density, but has never been observed. The CNRS and German research centres from the Helmholtz Association have joined forces to create the Dark Matter Lab (DMLab), an International Research Laboratory (IRL) focusing on the mysterious substance that is dark matter.

Although the prehistoric site of Eynan-Mallaha in northern Israel has been thoroughly examined since 1955, it still holds some surprises for scientists. Seven prehistoric wind instruments known as flutes, recently identified by a Franco-Israeli team 1 , are the subject of an article published on 9 June in Nature Scientific Reports .

The liver could influence the body's central biological clock, a group of brain cells that influence most aspects of physiology and behaviour. Our liver plays a role in regulating our central biological clock, scientists from CNRS and Université Paris have discovered. The results of their study, published on 17 May in Science Advances, show that the biological clock of mice can be reprogrammed by inserting human liver cells into the animal's liver.