news 2016

In the Yuanyang region of China where rice cultivation is a tradition, scientists from INRA and CIRAD, working in collaboration with a Chinese team, have focused on the defence mechanisms of rice against its pathogenic agents.

In the Yuanyang region of China where rice cultivation is a tradition, scientists from INRA and CIRAD, working in collaboration with a Chinese team, have focused on the defence mechanisms of rice against its pathogenic agents.

It isn't an animal, a plant, or a fungus. The slime mold ( Physarum polycephalum ) is a strange, creeping, bloblike organism made up of one giant cell. Though it has no brain, it can learn from experience, as biologists at the Research Centre on Animal Cognition (CNRS, Université Toulouse III—Paul Sabatier) previously demonstrated.

An international group of researchers led by LSCE (CEA-CNRS-UVSQ) has published a thorough budget of methane sources and sinks 1 over the last decade in the Earth System Science Data (ESSD) journal,

Why did the rhythm of glaciations suddenly slow down about a million years ago? To answer this question and to better forecast future climate change, a consortium of researchers from 14 institutions

With an exploding population, massive urbanization and uncontrolled deforestation, West Africa is faced with major change, which could see anthropogenic 1 pollution increase threefold between 2000 and 2030.

Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the Sun, has a rocky, Earth-sized planet located in the star's habitable zone, where liquid water can exist on the surface. This major discovery was made by an international team of researchers including Julien Morin from the Laboratoire Univers et Particules de Montpellier (CNRS/Université de Montpellier), and is published on 25 August 2016 in Nature .

Last month, the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) as measured at Amsterdam Island, in the southern Indian Ocean, for the first time exceeded the symbolic value of 400 ppm 1 , or 0.

Deep inside Bruniquel Cave, in the Tarn et Garonne region of southwestern France, a set of man-made structures 1 336 meters from the entrance was recently dated as being approximately 176,500 years old.

Coral reefs biodiversity facing climate change The research schooner Tara will leave her home port of Lorient on May 28th 2016 for a new expedition in the Asian Pacific.

For the first time, scientists have calculated the reduction in emissions required in agriculture to reach the goal of the Paris Agreement to limit global warming to 2°C by 2100.

So much dust is scattered across the planet by the winds of the Sahara that it alters the climate. However, the emission and transport of this dust, which can reach the poles, fluctuate considerably. Although many hypotheses have been put forward to explain this phenomenon, no unambiguous relationship between this dust and the climate had been established until now.

Wood has many uses, which require to know its shrinking 1 and swelling capacity in relation to humidity (known as dimensional stability). Researchers from the CNRS and Cirad 2 have shown that in Bagassa guianensis , a fast-growing Guianese tree, the secondary metabolites, whose main purpose is to defend the tree against insects and fungi, also serve to reduce shrinkage.

Ants collectively build nests whose size can reach several thousand times that of individual ants and whose architecture is sometimes highly complex. However, their ability to coordinate several thousand individuals when building their nests remains a mystery. To understand the mechanisms involved in this process, researchers from CNRS, Université Toulouse III – Paul Sabatier and Université de Nantes 1 combined behavioral analysis, 3D imaging and computational modeling techniques.