Five of the nine districts of Lyon, the second largest French city, are being monitored for the H5N1 virus, better known as “Bird Flu”.

In June 2011, a demonstration was held in Paris to protest nuclear power. Among the demonstrators were two precocious little girls who had a lot to say on the subject. The interviewer could hardly get a word in!

Being born premature is risky, but thanks to modern medical techniques, six out of ten babies who are born greatly premature will grow up to be perfectly healthy children.

A robot is sent into a deep ocean fault south of the Azores in the Atlantic Ocean. Its mission: to explore mineral chimneys and collect the organisms that can live there without sunlight.

It’s common to see photos of celebrities aged forty and up happily pregnant or pushing a pram. But according to most doctors, a woman’s chances of conceiving drop dramatically after age thirty-eight or so. Of course there are exceptions. Modern medical fertility treatments allowed a sixty-six-year-old Romanian woman to give birth to twins in 2005. But unless we’re willing and able to procure such treatments, which can be financially, emotionally, and physically draining, those who want to wait until their forties to have kids will have to take their chances.

Tuberculosis remains a deadly disease—affecting 10.6 million people annually and killing one person every twenty seconds. The recent development of multidrug-resistant strains of the bacteria has made TB even more threatening. Especially affected are areas without the proper means of fighting the illness. Eight countries accounted for more than two thirds of the global total: India, Indonesia, China, the Philippines, Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. According to the WHO, 13 billion dollars would be required to effectively combat the disease.

Billions (oui, milliards!) of birds migrate from Africa every year, and with bird flu developing rapidly, their arrival to France is closely monitored at the Marquenterre National Park. Learn how French scientists and engineers there have taken innovative measures to make it difficult for the virus to settle in the mud where the birds like to feed.

Will French dentists soon have their patients grow new teeth, instead of filling in the old ones? New techniques using restorative molecules and even stem cells (which can be found in the baby teeth of children) will go a long way toward helping people smile filling-free.