Aux frontières du vivant

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!