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Unlike animals, plants have cells that are all surrounded by a strong wall. This protects them but also encloses them in a rigid skeleton. So how can they grow despite this wall? Scientists from INRAE and the CNRS, in collaboration with Swiss and Belgian teams, have now unlocked part of this secret.

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

French and Chinese scientists have made surprising discoveries about the crucial roles of soil fungi in forest ecosystems. This work arose from an international collaboration between researchers at INRAE, the University of Lorraine, the University of Aix-Marseille, Beijing Forestry University, the Kunming Institute of Botany, and the Yunnan Key Laboratory for Fungal Diversity and Green Development.

Using a new analysis method for satellite images, an international research team, coordinated by the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) and INRAE, mapped for the first time annual changes in global forest biomass between 2010 and 2019. Researchers discovered that boreal and temperate forests have become the main global carbon sinks.

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.

Numerous studies are now reporting the harmful effects of air pollution on the central nervous system (neurodegenerative diseases in adults, neurodevelopmental disorders in children). Glaucoma, the second leading cause of blindness worldwide, is a neurodegenerative disease of the optic nerve whose principal characteristic is thinning of the retinal nerve fiber layer.

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 .

  Bird populations across continental Europe have declined by 25% in 40 years, with this figure reaching nearly 60% for species found in agricultural environments. Intensive farming is the main source of pressure linked to declining bird populations. These findings come from the largest and most comprehensive bird study to date in Europe.

Air pollution is an acknowledged environmental factor in high blood pressure. It consists of a mixture of particles and gases whose combined effects on human health are not yet well known. A team from Inserm and Sorbonne Université, assisted by international collaborators, used continuous monitoring to study the daily life impact of a mixture of five air pollutants on the blood pressure of 221 MobiliSense study participants in the Greater Paris area.

A team from the CEA and CNRS have discovered the existence of mirusviruses: a major group of viruses abundant on the surface of the seas and oceans, where they infect single-celled plankton. These findings appear in Nature on 19 April. The discovery provides a better understanding of the scope of ocean biodiversity and the importance of viruses in these ecosystems.

Publication of the Physics Laboratory in the Physical Review Fluids on April 4, 2023. Communication of the CNRS on April 3, 2023. Extreme heat events are rare, but have significant consequences on living beings and their environments. Anticipating their arrival is a major challenge. In an article published in Physical Review Fluids on April 4, an interdisciplinary team of French scientists, including members of the Physics Laboratory of ENS de Lyon, unveils an artificial intelligence able to predict heat waves.

Extreme heatwaves are rare, but they have major consequences on living beings and their environments. Anticipating their arrival is a central challenge. In an article published in Physical Review Fluids on April 4th, an interdisciplinary team of French scientists 1 from the CNRS, the CEA, and the Claude Bernard University Lyon 1 unveiled artificial intelligence 2 that can predict heatwaves.

Sorbonne University Alliance On March 4, a historic agreement was reached by the United Nations to preserve marine biodiversity. Christophe Prazuck , director of the Océan Institute , discusses this major step forward and the participation of the Sorbonne University Alliance in this international scientific effort.

Exposure to extreme temperatures from the fetal stage could impact health. This is what suggests a study by researchers from Inserm, Université Grenoble Alpes and CNRS, based on the SEPAGES cohort , intended to study the impact of various environmental factors on the health of pregnant women and their children.

Gone are the days when the octopus was, in the collective imagination, a frightening sea monster attacking Jules Verne's Nautilus. The image of the octopus has now changed. For example, the cephalopod took on the pseudonym Paul during the 2010 soccer World Cup, and made predictions about the outcomes of games (more or less successfully.

Publication of the LGL-TPE in the journal Nature Communications on January 21, 2023. Communication of the CNRS-INSU on February 3, 2023. The abiotic reactions that allow the formation of complex, potentially prebiotic organic molecules are a missing key to determining where life may have emerged. The limited variety and simplicity of the abiotic organic molecules observed have long discredited the theory of a hydrothermal origin for the emergence of life on Earth.

According to a study published in The American Naturalist on 6 January 2022, sequences of environmental events over time influence population dynamics in wild species. A research team led by Marlène Gamelon, a researcher at the CNRS 1 , has studied the influence of sequences of oak mast seeding events over the years on a population of wild boars 2 , which are major consumers of acorns.

A newly identified process of natural iron fertilization in the ocean fuels regional CO2 sinks. This was demonstrated by a study published May 25 in Science and co-authored by 25 researchers from the Tonga project. This project was led by two researchers from the IRD and CNRS, with over 90 scientists from 14 French laboratories based in mainland France, New Caledonia, and 6 international universities.

How will our glaciers evolve during the 21st century - In a new study to be published on January 5 in the journal Science , an international team 1 , including scientists from CNRS and the University Paul Sabatier Toulouse III, reveals a loss of glacier mass greater than previously projected. According to their work, this loss increases by 14% to 23% compared to previous projections, including those used in the last IPCC report.