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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.

But this particular mini-moon may be a little different – as experts have suggested it’s not a moon at all, but man-made space junk.

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.

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.

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.

OpenAI released GPT-3, the third iteration of its ever-growing language model, in July, and the program and its prior iterations have helped create some of the most fascinating AI language experiments to date. It’s also inspired vigorous debate around the ethics of powerful AI programs that may be used for more nefarious purposes, with OpenAI initially refusing to publish research about the model for fear it would be misused.