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IPO window opens; NCAA funds Temple AI mentor for student-athletes; ex-Radio 1 DJ Tim Westwood charged with rape; C-SPAN caller confronts Speaker Mike Johnson over military pay; upcycled water bottles become high-performance supercapacitor
IPO-ready CEOs see ideal market conditions to list—will the window last?
IPO-ready CEOs see ideal market conditions to list—will the window last? After a yearslong drought and a SPAC hangover worthy of medical intervention, a run of mostly successful debuts and a roughly 70% jump in IPO proceeds year-to-date has confidence back—and private equity, sitting on a record 29,000 portfolio companies worth $3.6 trillion, is itching for exits after average holds stretched past six years. Regulators are dangling sweeter terms, even musing about less-frequent report cards, worried that endless private cash will hollow out America’s great national pastime: the stock market. Investors, chastened by 2021’s carnival, now want a quaint relic called profits—a quarter of this year’s IPOs had them, more than double 2021’s share. Names in the queue or just through the door: CoreWeave, Figma, Wealthfront, Navan, Netskope, StubHub, and Proofpoint, which could float around $20 billion. Blackstone broke a four-year lull with one listing and is prepping Ancestry.com; it’s also weighing an IPO for Encore. Goldman just had its busiest IPO week since July 2021. Caveat: post-listing performance is patchy—the Renaissance IPO index is only slightly ahead of the S&P, buoyed by a few high-fliers. As one CEO put it, investors want the window open—and fast. With “capital not free any longer” and PE overextended, the window is open; it just might be a drive-thru, not a banquet.
Temple University researchers secure NCAA grant to develop AI mentor for student-athletes
Temple University researchers secure NCAA grant to develop AI mentor for student-athletes: Meet Sam, the virtual mentor inside JournAI, a Temple-built app designed to support athletes’ mental health, career planning, and life after the final whistle—aka that “go pro in something other than sports” moment the NCAA loves to advertise. Led by associate professor Elizabeth Taylor with former Owls athletes, the team landed roughly a third of the $100,000 2025 Innovations in Research and Practice Grant; early pilot tests with about 30 Division I–III athletes showed promising behavioral changes. Sam is non-gendered, confidential, and built with guardrails—no, it won’t write your term paper—and serves as a bridge to campus resources rather than a replacement for humans. The next phase aims to enroll 75–100 participants in Spring 2026, with the long-term goal of making Sam available to all NCAA athletes, and maybe all college students. In short: an NCAA-backed tool that might actually help student-athletes go pro in well-being, not burnout.
Tim Westwood, former Radio 1 DJ, faces rape charges
Tim Westwood, the former Radio 1 DJ, faces rape charges, with the 68-year-old now charged with sexual offences against seven women. Authorities have not released further details at this time.
C-SPAN caller confronts Speaker Mike Johnson over potential lapse in military pay: “My kids could die”
C-SPAN caller confronts Speaker Mike Johnson over potential lapse in military pay: “My kids could die.” In a rare C‑SPAN call-in—the first by a sitting Speaker since 2001—Johnson fielded an emotional plea from a woman whose husband serves, as military families brace for a possible pay lapse. Johnson put the onus on Democrats for refusing to back a GOP spending package, a master class in Washington’s favorite exercise: turning troop pay into a partisan tug-of-war. The exchange laid bare the stakes for families while leaders keep perfecting the art of blame without budget.
Upcycled water bottles transformed into a high-performance supercapacitor
Upcycled water bottles transformed into a high-performance supercapacitor: Researchers reporting in Energy & Fuels used heat-based fabrication to turn landfill-bound PET from single-use bottles into both electrodes and separator films, building an all-plastic supercapacitor that outperformed a similar device using a traditional glass fiber separator. In other words, a bottle that finally stores energy instead of guilt—proof that with a little ingenuity, our throwaway culture can be tricked into doing something useful. Now if only the companies churning out PET could keep up.
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This podcast is a fully automated experiment in AI-generated content. Generative AI handles the entire process, including code, content selection, summarization, and audio production. The podcast processes material from various sources, condenses it into concise text, and converts it into speech. No human intervention is involved in the production process.
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