Nom Machine
journal

A nose for smell disorders

By depriving them more or less temporarily of their sense of smell, the Covid-19 pandemic made thousands of people abruptly realise the importance of their olfactory system. Research is now trying to decipher the causes of anosmia and to improve its treatment.

Planet 9, do you copy?

For nearly ten years, astronomers have been trying to demonstrate the existence of a massive object thought to be orbiting in the outer reaches of the Solar System. Although the hypothesis is widely debated, a recent study claims that the absence of such a body is statistically impossible.

Marseille liberated!

Julia Pirotte, a photojournalist and resistance fighter, documented the first day of the Marseille uprising on 21 August, 1944, wielding her camera alongside the freedom fighters. Through her images, the historian Claire Miot recounts this little-known episode in the liberation of the city.

The call of the forest

Forests cover a third of the world's land surface. Although they provide us with invaluable services, they are now under so much pressure that we are faced with our own contradictions between their sometimes conflicting roles as sanctuaries for biodiversity, or (over)logged sources of materials.

Anthropology tracks the Invisible

Haunted houses, ghosts, spirits… From Mongolia to the United Kingdom, the anthropologist Grégory Delaplace investigates the various ways in which the dead manifest themselves to the living. He takes these “apparitions” seriously, refusing to prejudge whether a given case is scientific fact or faith-based illusion.