Céline FERLITA

Dated from the late13th century, the so-called "Pisana Carta” is considered to be the oldest nautical chart that has ever come down to us. It mainly covers the Mediterranean Sea, of which the Spanish and French coasts and the large islands are represented with some degree of accuracy. This map is part of the charts called "portolans” and it comprises their main attributes: harbour and port names inscribed perpendicular to the coastline, wind lines indicating compass directions and distance…

This map was drawn up by the Genoese Nicolas Caverio circa 1505 and shows all the Portuguese ports of call along the route to the Indies. It provided one of the oldest mappings of the east coast of Africa. The Indian Ocean which had been explored as early as 1498 by Vasco de Gama was gradually taking its modern form. This famous portolan is also a record of European explorations in Central America and Brazil at the turn of the 16th century. A map kept at the French national library BnF …

What do we know about the Indian Ocean? It was not the result of an extraordinary discovery but rather of successive explorations and exchanges between the civilizations of the West and the East. Historians trace the history of its representation through the study of nautical charts from Antiquity to the 18th century. They thus show us that the narrative of its fabrication is strongly linked to its representation and that the maps have thus contributed to giving this ocean its meaning and…

Portrait de Sébastien de Raucourt lauréat de la Médaille de Cristal 2018 du CNRS. Ingénieur de recherche dans l'équipe de planétologie et de sciences spatiales à l'Institut de physique du globe de Paris (DR01) et responsable de l'équipe technique développant le sismomètre planétaire au coeur de la mission InSight de la Nasa.

Portrait de Jérôme Gaillardet lauréat de la Médaille d'Argent 2018 du CNRS. Enseignant-chercheur en sciences de la Terre à l'IPGP (DR01) et à l'Institut universitaire de France, directeur de l'équipe de Géochimie des enveloppes externes et coordinateur, à l'échelle nationale, de l'infrastructure de recherche Observatoire de la zone critique, applications et recherche.

Portrait de Judit Gervain lauréate de la Médaille de Bronze 2018 du CNRS. Chercheuse en neurosciences cognitives développementales, spécialisée dans la compréhension de l'apprentissage de la langue maternelle par les nourrissons, au Laboratoire psychologie de la perception (DR01).

Dans ce cinquième épisode de la série "Langues vivantes, langues vitales", rencontre avec Suat Istanbullu et Joseph Jean-François Nunez, deux doctorants qui étudient leur langue natale. Une position qui assure un avantage au linguiste en lui permettant d'instaurer rapidement une relation de confiance avec les locuteurs de sa propre communauté linguistique. Elle peut aussi très vite se transformer en piège si le chercheur oublie de garder son recul critique et son objectivité.

Dans ce sixième épisode de la série "Langue vivantes, langues vitales", Elsa Oréal et Jean-Michel Hoppan, nous parlent de l'intérêt de l'étude des langues anciennes dans un contexte linguistique actuel. Loin d'être un objet d'étude isolé, ces langues permettent de voir l'évolution d'un système linguistique dans le temps et de comprendre les propriétés du langage en général. Ainsi des sciences comme l'épigraphie ou la paléographie contribuent également aux débats scientifiques d'aujourd'hui.

Ce quatrième épisode de la série "Langues vivantes, langues vitales", pose la problématique de l'apprentissage des langues à tradition orale. Sans traces écrites, comment apprendre et étudier ces langues ? La constitution de données primaires est une étape primordiale pour leur analyse. Paulette Roulon-Doko et Isabelle Bril, linguistes de terrain, nous expliquent leurs méthodes et le matériel utilisés lors de leur travail au sein des communautés linguistiques qu'elles étudient.

Ce troisième épisode de la série "Langues vivantes / langues vitales" aborde la question des langues en voie de disparition. Quels sont les moyens d'action pour le chercheur ? Katharina Haude et Mark Van de Velde, linguistes de terrain, évoquent les projets qu'ils ont menés en Amérique du Sud et en Afrique et les outils qu'ils ont mis en oeuvre. La création d'une documentation linguistique, d'une grammaire ou d'un dictionnaire sont des étapes importantes, mais l'appropriation par les locuteurs…

Le nombre de langues parlées dans le monde s'élève à environ 6900. Dans ce premier épisode de la série "Langues vivantes / langues vitales", les chercheurs Nicolas Quint et Alexandre François nous expliquent les points clés dans l'identification d'une langue. Pour distinguer une variété linguistique d'une autre, le chercheur doit tenir compte de critères qui ne relèvent pas exclusivement de l'aspect linguistique, mais aussi de facteurs sociaux tels que le sentiment identitaire d'appartenance à…

Dans ce deuxième épisode de la série "Langues vivantes / langues vitales", les chercheurs Bernard Caron et Valentina Vaparsky nous parlent de l'intérêt d'étudier des langues rares ou très peu parlées. Loin des idées reçues, ces langues ont beaucoup à nous apprendre sur le caractère universel du langage.

Professor José-Alain Sahel received the 2012 CNRS innovation medal. He is professor at UPMC andUniversity College London, head of ophthalmology at the Centre hospitalier national d'ophtalmologie des Quinze-Vingts and at the Rothschild Ophthalmological Foundation, as well as director of the Institut de la vision (joint Vision Institute of UPMC, CNRS and Inserm) in Paris. He discusses his team's work on the mechanisms of maintaining central vision that can be affected in certain pathologies or…

Alzheimer's disease is pervasive in our society and will remain so in the years to come. The Alzheimer and Tau-protein disorders laboratory studies one of the neurological mechanisms involved in Alzheimer's disease: neurofibrillary degeneration and particularly one of its main actors: the TAU protein. This fundamental research nevertheless remains in close cooperation with health professionals for patient care improvement.

The team of Ludwik Leibler, a CNRS researcher from the Laboratory for Soft Matter and Chemistry, conceived a new class of compounds which will revolutionize knowledges concerning materials. This material is repairable, recyclable, shapeable in a reversible way and unlimitedly at high temperature.

The Montpellier “Maison des sciences de l'Homme” hosted a meeting concerning the launch of a new research program: the ALIBI program (ALzheimer, Immigration and BIlingualism). During two years, a team composed of linguists, neuropsychologists, a socio-demographer, geriatricians and gerontologists studies the consequences of the Alzheimer ' s disease on the language of a population of Arabic language that has immigrated to France. The objective of this program is to adapt in a linguistic and…

Pascal Desbarats, computer scientist at the Bordeaux computer research laboratory (LABRI), explains the principle of 3D imaging. The emergence of a new discipline, paleopathology, led him to work with Hélène Coqueugniot, anthropologist at PACEA. Paleopathology is a branch of paleontology specialized in the study of ancient diseases. 3D imaging allows the reconstruction of an entire bone from human remains or a fossil fragment.

Dans le cadre d'une approche interdisciplinaire de leurs domaines respectifs, Lucile Capuron, docteur en psychologie, et Guillaume Ferreira, neurobiologiste, présentent leurs travaux sur la relation entre l'obésité et le cerveau. Lucile Capuron étudie les effets de l'obésité sur les troubles cognitifs chez l'Homme. Guillaume Ferreira étudie le lien entre l'obésité chez l'animal et ces mêmes troubles cognitifs. Ses travaux ont permis de mettre en évidence qu'une obésité…

Richard Maire, researcher at the CNRS, describes his career as a geographer and speleologist by looking back on his various explorations, always carried out in a team. He talks about his great expedition of the year 2000 when a team of researchers, speleologists, archaeologists and biologists thoroughly explored Madre de Dios Island, located off the Pacific coast of Patagonia. This scientific expedition was the subject of a 52-minute film entitled "The Ultima PatagoniaExpedition".

Glue doesn ' t only exist in our daily life : it ' s also an unknown scientific problem. The idea of this film is to make people rediscover something as banal as glue, which is the object of important questionings. A researcher in mechanics, a chemist and a physicist explain its mechanisms.

Caroline Dufy, economist and sociologist, presents her live path from learning Russian at the age of 10 onwards to her teaching and research activity specialising in the Russian economy. She devoted her postgraduate thesis to the political and economic upheavals in Russia after the fall of the Berlin Wall. She chose the Central Urals as her field of study for her thesis topic on Russian industrial cities. As a teacher, she conveys to her students curiosity and interest in a "complex…

Within a transdisciplinary approach between cell biology, biochemistry and genetics, Isabelle Sagot, biologist at the CNRS, studies the behaviour of yeast cells using fluorescent microscopy. This process became feasible with the discovery of GFP (Green Fluorescent Protein) which gives its fluorescent green color to jellyfish. This study also makes it possible to highlight the anarchic division of symptomatic cancer cells.

In South-Western France, several research laboratories work on polymers and their possible applications in the biomedical sector. In fact, they help to design new types of drugs at the nanoscale. Researchers Etienne Duguet and Sébastien Lecommandoux discuss the different processing phases of this macromolecule. They discuss the manufacture of nanovectors, polymer capsules that can be injected into the human body to identify diseased tissues or organs without being detected by the immune…

The film is a presentation by Xavier Piolle, geographer, of the activities of the SET (Society, environment, territory), a laboratory where the complex relationships that humans establish with their environment and territory are studied. Francis Jaureguiberry, sociologist, works on the notion of localisation in space through the use of mobile phones. He thus studies the impossibility for individuals to get lost and the notion of connection/disconnection between individuals according to the…

Laurent Bordes presents his laboratory located in Pau and his teams. They study fundamental mathematics but also its applications to different fields. In particular, manufacturers are asking for their help in solving problems. Mathematics is not so abstract...

Marie-Line Andréola and her team from the University explain the mechanisms of HIV virus replication. Although there is no vaccine available against AIDS virus, inhibitory drugs are on the market and help patients to live longer by greatly hampering the replication of the virus. The cellular and molecular microbiology and pathogenicity laboratory is particularly interested in one element, the integrase enzyme, as part of other inhibitory pathways.

For the first edition of the Cinémascience festival in Bordeaux a laboratory in Aquitaine is in the spotlight with Claude Delmas, as the director of the Institut de chimie de la matière condensée de Bordeaux (Bordeaux institute for condensed matter chemistry - ICMCB) presenting its activities. The ICMCB studies the properties of solid materials. Issues related to energy and the environment constitute one of its research lines. Jean-Claude Grenier works on fuel cells. Unlike conventional…

For the first edition of the Cinémascience festival in Bordeaux, a laboratory in Aquitaine is in the limelight with Franck Selsis, astronomer at the Bordeaux Astrophysics Laboratory, and Sean Raymond, astronomer at the University of Colorado, presenting their activities. They study exoplanets, which are outside our solar system. Despite the far distance involved, we can learn many things about them, including the composition of their atmospheres. It is then possible to reconstruct their…