news 2018

Paris, 9 January 2017 To paint quickly while creating exceptional texture and volume effects, J. M. W. Turner and other English artists of his generation relied on the development of innovative gels. All the rage in the 19th century—and still in use today—these compounds alter the properties of the oil paints they are combined with.

Paris, 29 November 2018 Scientists have revealed, for the first time outside our Galaxy, the properties of rapidly moving gas clouds in the immediate vicinity of a super-massive black hole, enabling the mass of the black hole to be measured with unprecedented accuracy.

Publication from the Chemistry laboratory in the Chemical Sciences journal on September 18, 2018. Abstract: The intrinsic photostability of nucleic acids is intimately related to evolution of life, while its understanding at the molecular and electronic levels remains a challenge for modern science.

Parker Solar Probe will soon become the spacecraft to travel the closest to the Sun, by positioning itself a little over 6 million kilometers from our star's surface. During its journey within the solar corona, the NASA probe will notably have an on-board instrument developed by researchers from the CNRS, université d'Orléans, and the CNES.

Observations made with the Very Large Telescope (VLT) of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) have, for the first time, detected the effects of general relativity predicted by Einstein, in the movement of a star passing into the intense gravitational field of Sagittarius A * , a massive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way.

In 2013, ESA's Planck mission unveiled a new image of the cosmos: an all-sky survey of the microwave radiation produced at the beginning of the Universe. This first light emitted by the Universe provides a wealth of information about its content, its rate of expansion, and the primordial fluctuations in density that were the precursors of the galaxies.

French researchers and Japanese engineers have joined forces to develop a new electron microscope that can scan the properties of matter on very small scales of time and space. The Centre d'élaboration de matériaux et d'études structurales (CEMES) of the CNRS and the Hitachi High Technologies Corporation (HHT) will formalize the creation of a joint laboratory on July 2, 2018, the first between the CNRS and a foreign company.

SPIRou, the new planet-hunting spectropolarimeter developed for the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT), has successfully recorded its first starlight. Ten years after it was first designed and following four intensive months of installation at CFHT, this international instrument in which France has played a leading role is on the point of initiating its scientific operations, namely the detection of exoplanets around nearby red dwarf stars and the study of newborn stars and planets.

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.

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.

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.

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 .

During the nighttime, it is hotter in the city than in nearby suburbs or the countryside. But just how much hotter differs between cities. Researchers from the MSE 2 (CNRS / MIT) international joint research laboratory and the Centre Interdisciplinaire des Nanosciences de Marseille (CNRS / Aix-Marseille University) 1 have shown that the determining factor is how cities are structured: more organized cities, like many in North America with straight and perpendicular streets, trap more heat.

MUSE spectrograph reveals that nearly the entire sky in the early Universe is glowing with Lyman-alpha emission Deep observations made with the MUSE spectrograph on ESO's Very Large Telescope have uncovered vast cosmic reservoirs of atomic hydrogen surrounding distant galaxies. The exquisite sensitivity of MUSE allowed for direct observations of dim clouds of hydrogen glowing with Lyman-alpha emission in the early Universe - revealing that almost the whole night sky is invisibly aglow.

The quantum Hall effect (QHE) is one of the most important effects being studied by solid-state physicists today. Measuring the limits at which it breaks down is extremely important - not only for fundamental physics but also for applying the effect as a resistance standard for redefining the kilogram.