The United States may end all scientific cooperation with China ● At least one unknown planet may exist on the outskirts of our solar system ● Distant human ancestors coexisted with dinosaurs

The United States may end all scientific cooperation with China

“The United States must stop fueling its own destruction,” said the official letter to Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, signed by 10 members of the Republican Party. It is about the termination of the agreement on scientific cooperation that exists between the two countries, Reuters notes.

The agreement in question was signed in 1979 and has since been renewed every five years. It, for example, stipulates forms of cooperation in fields related to science and technology, covering all scientific fields, from agriculture and paleontology to physics, chemistry, and others.

However, not all such cooperation between states went smoothly. For example, the Wolff Amendment, passed in 2011, prohibited any space cooperation between the US and China. As a result, China was excluded from participating in joint activities on the International Space Station.

At the time, China’s space program was believed to be much weaker and too low-level for the US to derive any benefit from it. Moreover, technological secrets could end up in the hands of the Chinese. We all know the result of this amendment. Meanwhile, China has built its own space station and is now competing with the US to build a permanent base on the moon and beyond.

In this case, the fears are almost the same. In particular, China could take advantage of American scientific progress to strengthen its military power. On the other hand, there are also fears that the US could lose valuable information about China’s technological development if the agreement is cancelled. And that would be a problem.

The agreement expires on August 27, and how it will be re-signed, if at all, is still being negotiated. However, as far as certain scientific fields are concerned, after much debate and research on the subject, it can be said with some certainty that Neanderthals, like dinosaurs and brontosauruses, were never part of the Comintern.

At least one unknown planet may exist on the outskirts of our solar system

The Oort Cloud, or Opic-Oort Cloud, is a field of planetesimals or small celestial bodies that extends around our solar system for a distance of 0.3 to 3.2 light years. Little is known about it, except that it is the birthplace of billions of comets and that it may have formed from celestial bodies that resulted from the formation of our solar system.

The new information we want to present to you comes from the art of a Franco-American group of astronomers who have published research on this matter, currently only on the ArXiv preprint platform. It’s about the possibility that there is at least one planet in this (still) mysterious Oort cloud that we don’t know about.

Theoretically, not only small celestial bodies would have been thrown to the edge of our solar system in its early moments, when the motion of planetesimals was chaotic. Given the fact that planets are already known to have been ejected from their solar system and roam the galaxy, there is a possibility that this could have happened here on site.

By calculation and relying more on statistics than direct observation, the researchers estimate that the probability that a protoplanet from our early solar system reached the Oort cloud around 4.5 billion years ago is 0.5%. And since then he has been spinning there without noticing it.

Interestingly, based on such calculations, the authors of the study came to the conclusion that there is a 7% probability that the planet would be captured by the Sun’s gravity and placed somewhere in the Oort cloud. Too far away to affect the orbits of the planets at the far end of the solar system, but may still exist there undetected.

As I said, the researchers only put forward a series of hypotheses, calculations and statistics. Nothing certain. If this unknown planet or planets really exist, it will be some time before we know for sure.

Distant ancestors of humans coexisted with dinosaurs

Don’t get impatient! We are not talking about the genus Homo (the genus Homo appeared about 2.4 million years ago), nor about the common ancestor of great apes and humans, which is believed to have evolved about 7 million years ago. The ancestor we mentioned is much older. More precisely, we are talking about the first forms of existence of placental mammals.

If we strictly follow the information provided by the archaeological record, placental mammals appeared shortly after the extinction of the dinosaurs, about 65 million years ago. In addition, they would have known an evolutionary boom in all the ecological niches that remained free. There are practically no fossils of such mammals that preceded the catastrophe that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs.

And yet this does not mean that they were not there. Even if this is not a new idea, it has already been discussed for decades, the hypothesis of the appearance of placental mammals from the Cretaceous period is getting a new boost. The impetus was an Anglo-Swiss team of paleontologists in the form of a study published in the journal Current Biology. Let’s explain.

As with the previously mentioned study, this is also a multi-probability statistical approach based on a Bayesian model. These scientists analyzed the fossil remains of approximately 20,000 species of extinct placental mammals and then confirmed them to be present. Thus, they followed the evolutionary model, the diversification of species.

Based on these observations, they concluded that 21.3% of the 380 mammal families examined had their evolutionary origins in the Cretaceous period. And this means that they coexisted with the last dinosaurs. Among them, and very importantly, there would be groups that much later gave rise to primates, canines, cats, etc.

What’s even more interesting, but not mentioned in the study, is that the same conclusion has already been drawn. Moreover, the study in question, published last year, is not even mentioned in the bibliography. But, in general, it is good that additional arguments lead to this question.

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