Publications of the scientific news sheets
10 000 years of Andean glacier melt explained
22 August 2011
IRD researchers and their partners (1) have succeeded in explaining 10 000 years of glacial melt in the Andes through work recently published in Nature. They showed that the Telata glacier in Bolivia retreated 3 km during the Holocene epoch covering that time and continuing in the Present. This ...
River Niger’s equilibrium disturbed by the “sand divers”
14 June 2011
The media, and also both national and regional organizations, are regularly crying out against the danger of seeing the River Niger silting up. However, although downstream of the inner Delta the river is influenced by the progress of sand bars under the effect of wind dynamics, in its upper ...
Increasing rice production using genes from the African species
23 May 2011
Rice is the third cereal in the world after wheat and maize, but the leader as far as human nutrition is concerned. It is the staple food for half of humanity. The 155 million hectares of rice fields in the world, mainly in the tropical regions, produce about 660 million tone of rice pear year. ...
Snakebites a public health problem in Africa
23 May 2011
For snakes the best form of defence is attack. Some show complete ruthlessness when they sense they are under threat. They all have their methods. The Gaboon viper, for example, injects its venom very deep into the muscles with its 5 cm long fangs. The spitting cobra blinds its victims with its ...
Rainfall forecasting could reduce food insecurity
28 April 2011
The future of Sub-Saharan Africa, where starvation rates, reaching nearly 30%, are the highest in the World, depends on the ability of the agricultural sector to guarantee food security for a steeply rising population. The only way to meet this challenge is to increase crop yields. Indeed, ...
The paradoxes of quinoa
07 January 2011
Quinoa has been a staple food for the Andean peoples for many centuries. Today it is experiencing great commercial success. Simultaneously diet, organic and fair-trade food, this pseudocereal* appeals to many consumers, particularly in the countries of the North. However, the boom in its ...
Chikungunya: The key role of "innate immunity"
30 December 2010
Chikungunya virus, first isolated in Tanzania in 1953, caused a great number of epidemics in Africa and South-East Asia in the course of the 20th Century. A global threat This infectious disease, like yellow fever and dengue, is caused by an arbovirus, transmitted by blood-sucking arthropods, ...
The Mekong, record of the Vietnam War
20 December 2010
Twenty years of war in South-East Asia, from 1955 to 1975, followed by political instability up to the end of the 1980s have strongly marked the environment. Analysis of Mekong Commission hydro-meteorological data showed IRD researchers and their partners that the changes in the great river’s ...
Vietnam: an “Asian miracle”?
28 October 2010
Is Vietnam, on its scale, a representative of the Asian Miracle, akin to the continent’s four tigers -Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea? IRD scientists from research unit UMR Développement, institutions et mondialisation and their partners have studied the economic policies which have ...
What future for biodiversity? Scenarios for action
27 October 2010
Like their counterparts in the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) on the future climate, life sciences specialists can now attempt to predict changes in the biodiversity. For that domain, the future is scarcely any brighter. Biological diversity will continue to decline throughout ...
The impact of mining in Bolivia
13 October 2010
There is gold and silver in the ground, but also antimony, tin, zinc, copper, bismuth and lead. The rock formations under the Bolivian town of Oruro, at the heart of the Andes Cordillera, harbour substantial amounts of precious and commercially prized metals. The silver deposits were already ...
Malaria came from gorillas
23 September 2010
The gorilla is the source from which humans were first infected by Plasmodium falciparum , the parasite responsible for the commonest and most virulent form of malaria. For the first time, an international consortium of researchers, including a team from the IRD and the University of Montpellier ...
Chile: the earth shook and the coast rose up
23 September 2010
On 27 February 2010, a huge earthquake, with magnitude 8.8, shook Chile. It left 500 dead and 13 million Chileans were affected, amounting to nearly 80 % of the country’s population. The event was one of the six most powerful earthquakes since the beginning of the 20th Century. Coast uplift has ...
Réunion Island coral reefs in poor health
10 September 2010
The once splendid colours are dulled, algae growing everywhere and the biodiversity is impoverished Who would believe that this forlorn picture depicts Réunion Island’s coral reef, known for its beauty and rich living communities? Since the 1980s, these corals have lost much of their splendour, ...
Scientists working for responsible fishing in Peru
10 September 2010
The Peruvian seine fishery, the world’s largest fleet deployed for one particular species, anchovy, has a capacity three times that needed for optimal exploitation of the stock. Research scientists from IMARPE and the IRD point to this imbalance, a real “time bomb” for the Peruvian fishing ...
Aids: Cameroon takes up the challenge
20 July 2010
50 % of Cameroonians in need of treatment against HIV now have access to such health care. In the early 2000s only 1% had such a possibility yet in less than ten years their numbers have gone from just a few hundred to nearly 80 000. From the beginning of the decade, a fall in the price of ...
Sorghum: where agriculture is in tune with biodiversity
30 June 2010
For 30 years Sub-Saharan Africa has experienced some severe stresses and disruption: doubling of the population, demographic pressure, loss of rainfall, soil impoverishment. These could generate changes in agricultural practices and therefore severe biodiversity erosion of crop plants such as ...
The Great Green Wall: how to check the advancing desert
10 June 2010
The desert has been nibbling away at the Sahel’s fertile land for several decades. To halt this advancing desertification, 11 African countries have come together to build a “Great Green Wall”. This immense project, initiated in 2005, aims to replant with trees a 15 km wide strip stretching 7000 ...
Why are urban populations in Africa becoming overweight?
31 May 2010
Urban dwellers in the developing countries are expected to more than double in number between 2000 and 2025. This surging urbanization comes along with changes in food habits: more meat, fats, salt and sweetened products, taking rapid snacks outside the home. Paradoxically, whereas ...
Patagonian glaciers in danger
31 May 2010
Remote lands at the far Southern reaches of the Latin American continent, Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, the archipelago at the extreme Southern end*, support the world’s most majestic monuments of ice. The Patagonian glaciers, including the famous Pio XI, the largest in Latin America with its ...
A new history of coffee
26 May 2010
Coffee now represents the primary source of wealth of many tropical countries. Only two species are cultivated, which produce the renowned Arabica and Robusta. However, a total of nearly 120 wild Coffea species exist which, starting from their origin in Lower Guinea, colonized the whole of ...
The black rat, Rattus rattus, helps plague persist in Madagascar
17 May 2010
Plague, a reemerging disease in several parts of the world, is an important public health problem in Madagascar. There are 200 to 300 cases per year on the island, making it one of the countries most affected by the disease. Yet none of the natural reservoirs of the infection lived there ...
Combination therapies against drug resistance in malaria
29 April 2010
Malaria kills between one and three million people each year. The African continent suffers 90% of these deaths. The pathogen responsible is Plasmodium falciparum, a parasite transmitted to humans by Anopheles mosquitoes. Treatments exist which in the past have proved to be effective, such as ...
When sea-level rises, corals remember
28 April 2010
It is essential to trace back and explain long-term climate variations in order to understand current global warming and predict its impact for the coming centuries. This is especially true for the countries of the South. Fossil corals are excellent indicators of rises in sea level, a direct ...
A new spectacular species of fungi
02 April 2010
In the Grand Sud of New Caledonia, a team of researchers from the Laboratoire des Symbioses Tropicales and its partners discovered a new species of fungi coloured an almost fluorescent pink with a highly surprising form. Podoserpula miranda , named by its discoverers for its remarkable ...
Aids: gorillas infected less than chimpanzees
25 March 2010
An extensive study conducted by IRD researchers and their partners for three years in Central Africa, the cradle of Aids, have just shown that SIV infection is much less common in gorillas than in chimpanzees: respectively 1.6% as against 5.9%. The scientists identified hotspots of gorillas ...
Snow cover monitoring in the Moroccan High-Atlas for better water resources management
22 March 2010
In Morocco, wide arid plains are irrigated at the edge of the desert. The snows of the High Atlas mountains are a substantial reservoir of water for the region, whose economy is strongly based on an agriculture. Water consumption for this farming is particularly high. An increase in water ...
The Indian Ocean influences El Niño onset
24 February 2010
Drought in Southern Africa, floods in Latin America, weak monsoon in South-East Asia: El Niño, an oceanic and atmospheric event resulting from a temperature anomaly in the tropical Pacific, strongly disturbs the climate global climate. Every seven years, its global-scale socio-economic and ...
Ciguatera fish poisoning: traditional remedies the source of antidotes
18 February 2010
Ciguatera fish poisoning is a serious intoxication linked to the consumption of marine products. It affects about 400 million people living in the endemic zones, mainly in the tropical Pacific. An estimated 100 000 people are poisoned each year, but this figure, based on the number of declared ...
Wallis and Futuna: when Earth and sea go wild
01 December 2009
In the middle of the night of 29 to 30 September 2009, tremors shook the Earth to the North of the Tonga Islands in the South Pacific. This was a strong submarine earthquake, with a magnitude of 8 on the Richter scale, and it triggered a tsunami, a giant wave which devastated the islands of ...
Biodiversity models in question
30 November 2009
Many species manage to coexist in the same ecosystem. How do they do this and share the available resources? Since Darwin and his species theory 150 years ago, ecologists have been seeking to determine the factors favouring diversity in nature. In almost a century of research, the most strongly ...
African women reacting against Aids
30 November 2009
Over 33 million people in the world are living with HIV, the Aids virus, and 75% of them live in Sub-Saharan Africa. Most of the people ill with the disease on that continent are women. In the Ivory Coast, the West African country most affected by the pandemic, two women are contaminated for ...
Adapt mosquito nets for better malaria control
30 October 2009
Malaria is the world’s most widespread parasitic disease and is both a cause and a consequence of poverty. It kills between one and three million people every year and the African continent suffers 90% of the deaths caused. The pathogens are parasites of the genus Plasmodium transmitted to ...
Brazil’s Northeast under the vagaries of the oceans
30 October 2009
Brazil’s Nordeste region, an extensive steppe called the “Sertão”, is home to over 50 million, 28% of the country’s population living on 12% of its surface area, is one of the world’s most heavily populated semi-arid zones. The rural population is severely deprived and people live from ...
Conservation of the natural evolutionary process a vital factor for New Caledonian biodiversity
28 September 2009
New Caledonia is considered as a priority zone of global significance for preservation of biodiversity, owing to the richness of its flora, exceptional in character but threatened. With the aim of achieving better understanding of the evolution of this flora, a phylogenetic study was conducted ...
Pearl millet, food for the future in the Sahel
01 July 2009
Pearl millet is the staple food for 50 million people living in the Sahel. It is extremely resistant to drought and well adapted to poor soils and remains the only crop that truly corresponds to the environmental conditions and traditional diet. However, harvests vary considerably depending on ...
Onchocercosis, or “river epilepsy”
01 July 2009
Fifty million epilepsy sufferers the world over carry the burden of social exclusion and deep distress. Their plight is even more painful in Africa: discriminating beliefs and deficiencies of access to treatments bring about an excessively high death rate. Developing countries, including in ...
