actualités 2024

Do price and display policies encourage consumers to make healthier food purchases - Does the coupling of these policies make them more effective - Researchers at INRAE have studied the separate effects of these two policies on the nutritional quality of food baskets. Through an experimental study, they show that price and nutrition labelling policies have no additive effects.

To fight the virus that causes influenza, one of the avenues being explored by scientists is the development of drugs capable of destabilising its genome, made up of eight RNA 1 molecules.

An international team of researchers from the AMAP laboratory (Botany and Modeling of Plant and Vegetation Architecture), under the auspices of the University of Montpellier and INRAE, has investigated the consequences of deforestation and degradation of tropical forests. The study, published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution on December 10, identified "winning" and "losing" species, leading to the functional impoverishment of tropical forest ecosystems.

On the banks of the Rhône, at the foot of the Massif du Malpas, a team of Inrap archaeologists has excavated part of an ancient spa area, occupied between the 1st and 4th centuries AD.

MASH is a growing pandemic worldwide, with obesity and diabetes on the rise. It is also an area of significant unmet medical need. François Pattou Metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD), formerly referred to as nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), impacts roughly 30% of the global adult population.

A team of astronomers has identified a potential new mechanism for bringing water to Earth, offering a promising departure from previous theories. Based on numerous observations of the Solar System, as well as observations of extrasolar debris disks by the ALMA radio telescope, the results are published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics .

Various complex processes enable the release of the sugars contained in wood, which are used in particular to produce second-generation bioethanol. Scientists from INRAE, the University of Reims-Champagne-Ardenne and the company Européenne de Biomasse have identified ranges of technological trade-off (temperature and pre-treatment time) that enable oak and poplar residues to be reclaimed while minimising the economic investment.

With the rise of antibiotics in the 1930s, phage therapy (i.e. the use of viruses called bacteriophages to fight bacterial infections) was abandoned. Today, with the rise of antibiotic resistance making the treatment of bacterial infections increasingly difficult, phage therapy is once again attracting the interest of doctors and researchers, despite the complexity of its application due to the great diversity and specificity of bacteriophages.

The higher we climb, the lower the oxygen supply to our bodies. Since 2019, a research team from Inserm, Grenoble Alpes University and Grenoble Alpes University Hospital has been investigating the health consequences of oxygen restriction. Their work has taken them to Peru, to Rinconada, the world's highest city (5,300 m), which has become a veritable open-air laboratory.

A new study, led by a CNRS researcher 1 , has highlighted just how significantly the level of the Mediterranean Sea dropped during the Messinian Salinity Crisis - a major geological event that transformed the Mediterranean into a gigantic salt basin between 5.97 and 5.33 million years ago 2 .

Scientists from the CNRS, a consortium of German universities, and the Max-Planck-Institut für Kernphysik working at the H.E.S.S. observatory have recently identified electrons and positrons with the highest energies ever recorded on Earth. They provide evidence of cosmic processes emitting colossal amounts of energy, the origins of which are as yet unknown.

Astrochemistry, a relatively new field, focuses on exploring chemistry in interstellar spaces to uncover insights about the origins of life on Earth. This discipline has seen significant advancements in recent years. Born in the late 1930s with the development of spectroscopy and radio astronomy, astrochemistry, a field at the intersection of astrophysics and chemistry, is now mature.

The seeds of maritime pines remember the temperatures they experienced during early development. This memory persists in young trees for at least two years after germination. The above discovery was made by researchers at INRAE, CEA, FCBA, the University of Orléans, the University of Perpignan, and the University of Lisbon.

Unsplash Teams from the departments of clinical and biological hematology, obstetrics and gynecology, pharmacovigilance, medical intensive care, infectiology, as well as the clinical research unit of theHôpital Cochin-Port Royal AP-HP, Université Paris Cité, Inserm and the HEMAPREG network, coordinated by Mr Pierre Pinson and Drs Ismael Boussaid and Rudy Birsen, have conducted a study on pregnancy-associated hematological cancers.

Observe almost any animal or plant, in any weather, day or night. This has been made possible thanks to the work of an international team, led by researchers from Westlake University, China in collaboration with INRAE, who have designed an embedded vision camera capable of analysing images in real time.

Myotubular myopathy is a rare genetic disease caused by mutations in the MTM1 gene. A study carried out in animals by researchers from Inserm, CNRS and the University of Strasbourg at the IGBMC, in collaboration with American teams, has shed light on the underlying mechanisms of this disease. Published in the journal Science , these studies suggest that vitamin K supplementation could improve certain symptoms of the disease, opening up new therapeutic prospects.

Central Africa, especially the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), is highly affected by successive mpox outbreaks. Until now, the extent of genetic diversity of the virus had not been well characterised in this region of the world. For the first time, as part of the AFROSCREEN project and the PANAFPOX project , teams from the Institut National de Recherche Biomédicale (INRB) in DRC, IRD and Inserm have provided important new information on the genetic diversity of mpox virus circulating in DRC and on the predominant route of transmission.

Infrasound are sound waves with frequencies below 20 Hz, outside the range audible to the human ear. Although they escape our auditory perception, these waves have significant effects on health, the environment and even animal biology. A great deal of research has explored the effects of infrasound, both natural and man-made, and has led to a better understanding of its implications.