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Sep 22, 2020

Inside First Light Fusion’s fight to solve clean energy and save the planet

Posted by in category: nuclear energy

Nuclear energy with no meltdowns and barely any waste. Can nuclear fusion beat the skeptics?

Sep 22, 2020

Earth is about to capture a new ‘mini moon’ (but it might not be a moon at all)

Posted by in category: space

O,.o.


A new mini-moon might be about to join Earth’s orbit briefly, before being hurled back into space.

‘Minimoons’ are only a few feet across, and each tends to do a stint of around a few months in orbit – before resuming their previous lives as asteroids.

Continue reading “Earth is about to capture a new ‘mini moon’ (but it might not be a moon at all)” »

Sep 22, 2020

Space Force deploys its first squadron outside of the U.S.

Posted by in categories: military, space

The “core space operators” deployed by the U.S. military’s controversial newest branch aren’t in orbit, they’re in Qatar.

Sep 22, 2020

BYD Enters The Finnish EV Bus Market Starting With Over 100 Buses

Posted by in categories: sustainability, transportation

BYD has announced a huge success in Finland, where it won the country’s largest order for electric buses, a total of 106 vehicles.

The order was placed by BYD’s recurring Scandinavian customer — Nobina — which purchased:

Sep 22, 2020

South China Sea Watch: Taiwan alarm and Indonesia standoff

Posted by in category: military

O,.o.


A look at recent developments in the South China Sea, where China is pitted against smaller neighbors in multiple territorial disputes over islands, coral reefs and lagoons. China flooded the Taiwan Strait at the northern end of the South China Sea with warplanes over two days last week in an apparent.

Sep 22, 2020

U.S. Federal Regulators Allow National Banks To Back Digital Dollar Stablecoins

Posted by in category: finance

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) has issued its second letter this afternoon allowing U.S. financial institutions to back digital dollar stablecoins under the leadership of Acting Comptroller Brian Brooks. This letter permits U.S. financial institutions to hold deposits as reserves for stablecoins that represent fiat currency such as the U.S. dollar.

The OCC regulates large national banks such as Wells Fargo WFC and J.P. Morgan Chase, so the guidance from this agency only applies to ‘National Associations’ and ‘Federal Savings Banks’. In coordination with the OCC, a statement from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the agency that has for the most part dominated this area of regulation in the U.S., supported the actions as well.

Sep 22, 2020

Physicists Just Discovered a Brand New Type of Superconductor

Posted by in categories: energy, physics

Scientists have long theorised that there are other types of superconductor out there waiting to be discovered, and it turns out they were right: new research has identified a g-wave superconductor for the first time, a major development in this area of physics.

Superconductors are materials that offer no electrical resistance, so electricity can pass through them with close to 100 percent efficiency.

That sounds great when you think about the potential of super-efficient power grids that don’t lose energy to heat. But there’s a catch. Materials that are able to act in this way usually need to be cooled to ultra-low temperatures before the actual superconductivity starts happening.

Sep 22, 2020

NASA, Space Force partnership aims to make space exploration safe

Posted by in categories: military, space

Some experts worry that deepening civil-military ties could pose problems.

Sep 22, 2020

RV-size asteroid to get closer to Earth than the moon

Posted by in categories: asteroid/comet impacts, existential risks

This asteroid isn’t socially distancing with Earth very well.

Sep 22, 2020

Microsoft exclusively licenses OpenAI’s groundbreaking GPT-3 text generation model

Posted by in categories: ethics, robotics/AI

OpenAI will still let researchers use the model.


Microsoft has expanded its ongoing partnership with San Francisco-based artificial intelligence research company OpenAI with a new exclusive license on the AI firm’s groundbreaking GPT-3 language model, an auto-generating text program that’s emerged as the most sophisticated of its kind in the industry.

The two companies are already entwined through OpenAI’s ongoing Azure cloud computing contract, with Azure being the platform on which OpenAI accesses the vast computing resources it needs to train many of its models, and a major $1 billion investment Microsoft made last year to become OpenAI’s exclusive cloud provider. Now, Microsoft is issuing yet another signal of high confidence in OpenAI’s research by acquiring the rights to GPT-3.

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