The sun alone produces more than 64 billion neutrinos per second and per cm2 that pass right through the Earth. These elementary particles of matter are everywhere, yet they remain almost entirely elusive. The key word is almost… The European infrastructure KM3NeT, currently being installed in the depths of the Mediterranean Sea, has been designed to detect the extremely faint …

Véronique Riffault, IMT Lille Douai – Institut Mines-Télécom and François Mathé, IMT Lille Douai – Institut Mines-Télécom The French Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health and Safety (ANSES) released a new notice concerning air pollution yesterday. After having been questioned on the potential changes to norms for ambient air quality, particularly concerning fine particles (PM10 and PM2.5), the organization has …

Nathalie Redon, IMT Lille Douai – Institut Mines-Télécom Last May, Paris City Hall launched “Pollutrack”: a fleet of micro sensors placed on the roofs of vehicles traveling throughout the capital to measure the amount of fine particles present in the air in real-time. A year before, Rennes proposed that residents participate in assessing the air quality via individual sensors. In France, for several …

Nuclear power stations are not the only sources of radioactivity in France. Other sources undeniably include hospitals and the construction industry, for example. Given the potential dangers to health and the environment, such sites have to be permanently tested. SMART, a team of experts in radioactivity from SUBATECH is a necessary third-party actor in this domain. The team brings objectivity …

By Véronique Riffault, Professor of Atmospheric Sciences, IMT Lille Douai – Institut Mines-Télécom This article was originally published in French in The Conversation France.   This winter, France and a large part of Europe were struck by episodes of particulate matter pollution. These microscopic particles are known as PM2.5 and PM10 when they measure less than 2.5 or 10 micrometers …

ALICE, the Cern experiment in charge of studying the quark-gluon plasma, restarted its main activities on November 17. Based in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland, ALICE mission is to track each single particle ejected when lead ions collide. Thanks to the “Run 2” upgrade that occurred at the LHC in early 2015, such collisions are now more energetic, …