In a general context of climate change, researchers at the Centre d'écologie fonctionnelle et évolutive (CNRS/Université de Montpellier/Université Paul Valery/EPHE-PSL) and their international partners revealed the impact of ocean cycles, such as the Pacific decadal oscillation and El Niño, on the survival of the Nazca booby, a species found on the Galapagos Islands.

Using a new computer model, researchers at the Ecole Centrale de Marseille and CNRS have shown that a fish expends less energy when it swims in a school, because neighbouring fish produce a 'suction' effect. This work will be published on 11 May 2018 in Physical Review Letters . Schools of fish provide a fascinating example of collective behaviour in which the group moves in a coordinated manner without the need for a leader.

Quantum chance is intrinsically different than classic chance. That is what the violations of Bell inequalities, a crucial step in understanding quantum mechanics, states. One drawback remains though: until now, testing these inequalities relied on experimental configurations that use parameters set from data generated by quantum systems.

Plants can detect the slightest angle of inclination. Yet the mechanism by which they sense gravity relies on microscopic grains. In theory, such a system should hardly allow for precise detection of inclination. Researchers from the CNRS, the French National Institute of Agronomic Research (INRA), and Université Clermont Auvergne have now explained this curious paradox.

The rose: an ornamental plant emblematic of the cultural and economic history of mankind. An international consortium involving INRA, ENS de Lyon, CEA, CNRS and Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1, has deciphered the genome of the rose. This work has enabled them to trace the respective contributions of European and Chinese roses to the genome of modern plants, and identify all the genes involved in the pathways for the biosynthesis of perfume and colour.

An international team led by researchers at CNRS, Université Grenoble Alpes and the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) has challenged currently held ideas about star formation. The unprecedented resolution of the observations obtained using the Atacama Large Millimetre/Submillimetre Array (ALMA) enabled them to measure the quantity of high-mass star-forming cores in a remote, very active region of our Galaxy, and show that there is a higher proportion of them there than expected.

Upolu, one of the nine islands of Samoa, in the Pacific Ocean. Well-known among fans of diving, this isolated coral reef promised to be a site of rich biodiversity for the scientists on the Tara Pacific expedition, principally from the CNRS, the CEA 1 and the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia.

France, the major bread-basket for Western Europe, experienced catastrophic yield losses in 2016. Scientists from INRA, CNRS and CEA 1 have shown that in 2016, and in other years, abnormally high temperatures in late autumn accentuated the negative effect on wheat production of excessive rainfall the next spring.

With uncertain future budgets for United Nations food aid, food security for refugee populations can only be achieved when aid is carefully targeted and effective. INRA researchers and their colleagues recommend taking simultaneous account of both individual and regionaland community-level data to effectively identify households facing food insecurity and/or economic vulnerability.

By studying calcium in fossil remains in deposits in Morocco and Niger, researchers have been able to reconstruct the food chains of the past, thus explaining how so many predators could coexist in the dinosaurs' time.

Mimicking photosynthesis in plants, using light to convert stable and abundant molecules like water and CO2 into a high energy fuel (hydrogen) or into chemicals of industrial interest, is a major research challenge today.

The European Research Council (ERC) has announced the recipients of its 2017 Advanced Grants, awarded to experienced male and female researchers well known in their fields.

The HESS international collaboration, to which CNRS and CEA contribute, has published the results of fifteen years of gamma ray observations of the Milky Way. Its telescopes installed in Namibia have studied populations of pulsar wind nebulae and supernova remnants, as well as microquasars, never before detected in gamma rays.

Chronic caloric restriction strongly increases the lifespan of a small primate, the grey mouse lemur. This is one of the results of a ten-year experiment conducted by researchers at the CNRS and the French National Museum of Natural History (MNHN), in partnership with other French teams. Chronic caloric restriction consists in eating a reduced but balanced diet from the outset of early adulthood.

An international team of researchers 1 , including a CNRS researcher at the department of Écologie et Dynamique des Systèmes Anthropisés (CNRS / Université de Picardie Jules Verne) has observed an acceleration in the increase of biodiversity on mountain peaks in Europe.

Biological tissues have complex mechanical properties – soft-yet-strong, tough-yet-flexible – that are difficult to reproduce using synthetic materials. An international team has managed to produce a biocompatible synthetic material that replicates tissue mechanics and alters color when it changes shape, like chameleon skin.

Developed and patented 1 in 2012 and 2014 in the Laboratoire d'Analyse et d'Architecture des Systèmes (LAAS-CNRS) and implemented industrially by Picometrics-Technologies, BIABooster technology can characterize DNA with new precision and sensitivity. When used to analyze residual DNA circulating in the blood, it has identified promising signatures for monitoring patients with cancer.

You can hear the perfect hello. And now you can see it too. Researchers from the CNRS, the ENS, and Aix-Marseille University 1 have established an experimental method that unveils the filter—that is, mental representation—we use to judge people when hearing them say a word as simple as “hello”. What is the ideal intonation for coming across as determined or trustworthy? This method is already used by these researchers for clinical purposes, with stroke survivors, and it opens many new doors for the study of language perception.

A research team from the Materials and Quantum Phenomena Laboratory (MPQ, University of Paris Diderot/CNRS) has just developed a new ultra-fast photonic device that operates at room temperature, enabling the detection of infrared radiation. This scientific advance will revolutionise the use of far infrared radiation in our daily lives.

Access to clean drinking water is considered to be one of the main challenges of the 21st Century, and scientists have just opened a path to new filtration processes. Inspired by cellular proteins, they have developed membranes with asymmetric artificial channels in the interior, from which they were able to observe “chiral” water 1 .