news 2025

Electric discharges have for the first time been recorded within the storms and whirlwinds of dust - known as dust devils - that sweep across the surface of Mars. Captured by the microphone of the SuperCam instrument on board NASA's Perseverance rover, the signals were analysed by a team of scientists from the CNRS, Université de Toulouse and the Observatoire de Paris - PSL, working as part of an international team.

Press release, Villeurbanne, October 9, 2025. The past of the planet Mars continues to captivate the scientific community.

Focus on the scientific publication "Geochemical chronologies in Paranthropus robustus teeth inform habitat and life histories," published on July 23, 2025, in Nature Ecology and Evolution , to which Vincent Balter, CNRS research director and member of the LGL-TPE laboratory at ENS de Lyon, contributed alongside Andrew Sillen and Christopher Dean.

Over the last 3,800 years, agro-pastoral activities have accelerated alpine soil erosion at a pace 4-10 times faster than their natural formation. The history of this erosion has just been revealed for the first time by a research team led by a CNRS scientist 1 . The team has shown that high-altitude soil was degraded first, under the combined effect of pastoralism and forest clearing to facilitate the movement of herds.

The NODSSUM interdisciplinary mission, led by CNRS and in collaboration with a team from Ifremer, ASNR and several national and international partners 1 , will set sail for a month on June 15. Scientists are planning two campaigns to use modern tools to map the main dumping zone for the many drums of radioactive waste that have been deliberately dumped for 40 years in the abyssal plains of the North-East Atlantic.

Since 2000, the world's glaciers have lost 5% of their initial volume, and 273 billion tonnes of ice are disappearing every year - the equivalent of 3 Olympic swimming pools per second. These are the results of an in-depth study of the global evolution of glaciers (excluding the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets) between 2000 and 2023, based for the first time on a combination of field measurements and satellite observations.