Content from Look at Sciences

At the edge of our solar system supposedly lies an immense planet. Five to ten times the size of the Earth. Several international teams of scientists have been competing in a frantic race to detect it, in uncharted territories, far beyond Neptune. The recent discovery of several dwarf planets, with intriguing trajectories, have put astronomers on the trail of this mysterious planet. Why is this enigmatic planet so difficult to detect? What would a ninth planet teach us about our corner of the universe? Could it help us unlock some of the mysteries of our solar system?

For several decades, geoscientists have been observing that the Earth is changing rapidly due to human intervention. This action has such a great impact on the biological, geological and atmospheric processes of the Earth that some scientists speak of the dawn of a new epoch: the Age of Man or the Anthropocene.

Several hundred million kilometers away, the space probe "Rosetta" and the small lander "Philae" orbit the sun on the comet "Churyumov-Gerasimenko", without any contact with Earth. On September 30, 2016 - two years after the launch of "Philae" - the landing of "Rosetta" on the comet marked the end of a space mission rich in discoveries, successes and setbacks. The documentary "Rendezvous with a comet: Mission Rosetta" revisits this extraordinary space adventure. After the landing of "Philae" on the comet "Churi" in November 2014 - probably one of the greatest successes in space research since the moon landing - the mission continued and provided a whole series of surprises.

Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity has revolutionised our understanding of gravity, space and time. Initially acclaimed, then forgotten, and now rediscovered, the adventure of this hundred-year-old theory has marked the scientific history of the 20th century. From its inception, a mathematical difficulty arose that could have nipped the theory in the bud: the Schwarzschild singularity. In the company of great international relativistic physicists, the viewer embarks on a discovery of this theory with a singular destiny. We discover a "curved" universe that proves to be even stranger than Einstein had envisioned, and harbours some objects - such as black holes - that still challenge today's scientists.

Here is the “lower-risk consumption room”, the drug injection room that opened in October 2016 in a building at Lariboisière Hospital in Paris. A place that the film never quits, except for a few seconds out on a stretch of pavement, as the credits open. One or two shots are enough to establish the exterior and remind us of the hostility of some nearby residents – the glimpse of a board tied to a window: “No to the drug injection room”.

By the time mankind is beginning to experience the first significant effects of climate change announced for decades by scientists, a major scientific campaign of clouds observation is taking place in the Caribbean, bringing together researchers from all over the world. It is no longer a question of preventing the warming of the atmosphere, but of knowing precisely what will be the scale of it. Within this research, the role of clouds is still the biggest unknown since we don't know if they will increase or dampen the warming. The tiny island of Barbados, where the campaign is taking place, is at the forefront of the challenges ahead. Through the successes and failures of the campaign, Barbadians and climatologists explore the fascination that clouds inspire. Somewhere between science, history and poetry, they draw a composite portrait of research.

It was November 12, 2014, at 5:03pm. Humanity had just accomplished a feat that will forever mark its history. Philae, the miniature laboratory integrated into the Rosetta probe, landed softly on comet 67P Chourioumov-Guérassimenko, better known as Tchouri. The culmination of a project decided twenty-one years earlier, in 1993, by the European Space Agency - the first to display the immense ambition of landing on one of these bodies made of ice and dust, archives of the solar system's infancy. To achieve this, it took years of preparation, a decade-long flight, six billion kilometers flown, thousands of scientists and engineers involved... Astrophysicist Anny-Chantal Levasseur-Regourd sums it all up: "From this mission, we hope - and can reasonably expect - to understand the origin of the solar system and how life appeared on Earth.

In 1924, a garden city, called “Ungemach”, was inaugurated in Strasbourg; it was restricted to couples who bore “healthy and fertile strains”. This officially eugenicist experience was endorsed by both political and scientific authorities, and the selection system lasted until the 1980s! To understand the genesis of such a project, it is necessary to revisit the history of eugenics. We will first go to England, where the concept was born and developed in the 1880s. Then to the United States, Switzerland, the Nordic countries, Japan, where, since the 1920s, large-scale sterilization policies have been implemented to eradicate health and social "defects", long before Nazi Germany. This question of eugenics is a universal one; its implementations were numerous and it still permeates ethical debates on medically assisted procreation techniques or Transhumanism today.