Aux frontières du vivant

Researchers from the CNRS had the idea to use soap bubbles to model the movement of real cyclones! By heating the base of the bubble and cooling its top, convection currents appear on its surface and form a beautiful vortex.

Do you feel like you're hallucinating or dizzy? No, you are not watching a psychedelic clip from the 1970s! These images are the product of mathematical calculations, a field that researchers call 'fractals'.

Attention masterpiece !... This is one of the 'star' images of the Hubble Space Telescope. Astronomers call this region of the sky the 'Columns of Creation'. It is our Universe. But what is the use of having eyes in the sky?

Today, CNRS researchers are trying to establish a link between the patterns that appear on a drop of dried blood and diseases that affect blood composition.

Actin is the substance that constitutes the cytoskeleton, that is, the skeleton of our cells. Researchers had fun extracting this substance from cells to see how it behaves.

When we run our brains, we use well-known cells called neurons; and to make them work, we have to give them energy! But who provides them?

Could it be an alien ultrasound? You are looking far, far away in space... Here is Stephan's quintet, a group of five galaxies located in the constellation of Pegasus. Enjoy these filaments of stars and gas !

You are probably already familiar with this kind of image: by measuring the sugar consumption of different parts of the brain, researchers deduce the activity of different brain areas. But what are the interconnections between these areas?

You see these little crystals, that take beautiful colors when illuminated with a special light? They are tiny and they are made from ... egg. The study of crystals allows researchers to develop new medicines.

Animal, vegetable or mineral? Well no, cerebral! You are looking at a grey cell. In other words: a neuron! From the cell to the axon, the guided tour begins!

All these stars are in our galaxy, several million billion kilometers from us. Photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope, they belong to the family of planetary nebulae.

Welcome to the wonderful world of plankton! Plankton are tiny living creatures that are carried in the water.

This is a satellite photo of a small part of Kansas. And those disks? Fields watered by a rotary sprinkler system. The red color highlights the wettest areas where the vegetation is densest due to the intensive irrigation, not without ecological impact.

Here is the Sun, as seen by the American Solar Dynamics Observatory satellite.

Take a look here and project yourself 2,400 years back in time: Greek columns, there you are! We are in Delphi, in front of the Tholos. In 2013, French researchers digitized the famous rotunda with this portable scanner.

For a long time, the aeronautics industry has been able to visualize them during wind tunnel tests. But this is the first time that the shock wave has been filmed with real aircraft, in real flight conditions.

Let us introduce you today to the best friend of biologists: Caenorhabditis elegans! Why is this terrestrial worm so interesting to researchers?

Pollen is the fertilizing element of plant species, and each species produces grains of different shapes and sizes.

At the South Pole, every year, new layers of snow cover the old ones. The deeper we dig, the further back in time we go.

Prisoner of amber, this small wasp has crossed the ages. Its history begins 100 million years ago, at the time of the dinosaurs.

A satellite photo of the Earth, taken at night... Cities swarming with light... Or fields under the bluish light of the Moon... Dark rivers... Where are we?

Colored filaments grow, rise, bud... Strange crossing between the alga, the jellyfish, and the mushroom... Welcome to the fairy world of chemical gardens !

Here, each cell randomly produces a color: red, yellow, cyan or magenta. The researchers have named this technique Brainbow, a contraction of Brain and rainbow. Thanks to this trick, INSERM biologists can more easily follow each neuron in the inextricable web of nerve cells and try to understand the causes of certain brain diseases. …

This is the skeleton of Trypanosama Brucei, otherwise known as the tsetse fly. The Trypanosama form a large family of parasites, the most famous of which is responsible for sleeping sickness. After being transmitted by a tsetse fly bite, the parasite first causes fever and fatigue.

We are in Alaska, above the gigantic Columbia Glacier. For centuries, the glacier was massive enough to resist the assaults of the ocean. Then, victim of global warming, it melted like snow in the sun and lost up to 500 meters of thickness!

Microscopic beings are observed living in hyperacidic pools, twice as salty as the Dead Sea and whose temperature can reach 115 degrees.

Here is the cut of a red blood cell. But this one is infested by malaria. If the Pasteur Institute, at the origin of these images, is at the forefront of the search for a vaccine, 40% of the world's population is exposed to the terrible disease.

These images do not tell the story of the creation of algae, but of our muscles: stem cells with a single nucleus fuse to form myotubes, which then become muscle fibers.

Right in front of you: a sample of uranium carbide mixed with concrete as seen under a scanning electron microscope. The size of the gray crack in the center is only a few microns, or a million times smaller than a meter!