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  • Spotify and Youth Music Open Doors for Future Artists — Spotify

    Spotify and Youth Music Open Doors for Future Artists — Spotify

    The music industry depends on fresh ideas, bold voices, and emerging talent. Yet across the U.K., too many young musicians lack the space to develop their craft, leaving a critical gap in the evolution of new sounds and future careers.

    The need for creative spaces has never been more urgent. Between 2010 and 2023, more than 1,200 youth centers closed across the U.K.—an average of one every week. These losses hit underserved communities the hardest, stripping young artists of the safe, supportive environments they need to grow.

    To help change this trajectory, Spotify is strengthening our commitment to youth well-being and creativity through the Open Doors Fund, part of our ongoing partnership with Youth Music. Backed by Spotify’s Creator Equity Fund, the initiative provides essential funding and opportunities to empower the next generation of creators—and ensure the spaces that shape them not only survive, but thrive.

    Championing youth spaces across the U.K.

    To amplify this effort and spark national conversation, Spotify and Youth Music have launched a multichannel campaign that brings the realities facing youth spaces into sharp focus through powerful storytelling and public engagement.

    Our hero video captures a week inside a youth center, showcasing the creativity and community these spaces make possible. Acclaimed artist and advocate Kojey Radical dropped in to spend time with Girl Grind UK, a youth music space where young women are building confidence, community, and creative careers, to witness the impact of these spaces firsthand.

    Across London, out-of-home placements amplify youth voices in public spaces, while a coordinated social media campaign encourages audiences to engage, share, and take action.

    The campaign also lives on-platform through Open Doors, a bespoke playlist curated with Kojey. Featuring both established and emerging U.K. artists who began their journeys in grassroots spaces, the playlist celebrates the vital role these centers play in nurturing talent and calls for their continued protection.

    Spotify London welcomes the next generation of creators

    As part of our commitment to the Open Doors campaign, Spotify brought the mission to life within our own walls, hosting an inspiring Open Doors Day at our London office. The event welcomed young people from 15 youth centers supported by the Open Doors Fund, offering a space for connection and creativity.

    The urgency behind this work is clear. Youth Music warns that within the next decade, young people across eight U.K. regions could lose access to vital music projects. Chronic underfunding—made worse by the cost-of-living crisis—has pushed many community spaces to the brink. Today, two in five (41%) grassroots youth music projects are at risk of closure, a sharp 17% rise since 2024.

    “These spaces are the heart of local communities, giving young people a place to feel connected, inspired, and empowered,” said Matt Griffiths, CEO, Youth Music. “With Spotify’s support, we can give these vital spaces a lifeline, ensuring they continue to serve young people for years to come.”

    Open Doors Day was designed to equip the next generation with real tools for success. Through hands-on workshops, behind-the-scenes industry insights, and conversations with the Spotify and Youth Music teams, attendees gained invaluable guidance on building creative careers. The day also featured special appearances by award-winning artist Guvna B and Grammy-nominated songwriter Carla Marie Williams MBE, who shared their journeys and inspired young creators to keep pushing forward.

    Empowering generations to come

    The Open Doors Fund is about more than just keeping the lights on. It’s about lifting up young people, fostering creativity, and providing pathways into the music industry. A staggering 54% of Youth Music’s funded partners have a waiting list of young people eager to participate, but a lack of funds prevents them from doing so. 

    Spotify and Youth Music are committed to extending the Open Doors Fund into 2026, ensuring that even more youth spaces receive the funding they need to continue supporting young people. 

    “The Open Doors Fund isn’t just about preserving spaces—it’s about powering what’s possible,” said Kristin Jarett, Social Impact Lead, Spotify. “When young people have the tools, the space, and the support, they create the future of music. We’re committed to making sure those doors stay open.”

    The Spotify and Youth Music partnership is a testament to the power of collaboration and the importance of investing in the next generation of artists. By providing essential resources and opportunities, the Open Doors Fund is helping to keep the beat alive by ensuring that young people from all backgrounds have the chance to pursue their musical dreams. Because the artists of tomorrow need a space to begin.

    To learn more about the Open Doors Fund, or to get involved with Youth Music, visit here.

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  • Citadel Securities buys Morgan Stanley’s electronic options market making unit – Financial Times

    Citadel Securities buys Morgan Stanley’s electronic options market making unit – Financial Times

    1. Citadel Securities buys Morgan Stanley’s electronic options market making unit  Financial Times
    2. Citadel Securities Buys Morgan Stanley’s Options Market Maker  Bloomberg.com
    3. Morgan Stanley Sells Options Market Maker to Citadel Securities, Bloomberg Reports  MarketScreener
    4. Morgan Stanley sells options market marker to Citadel, Bloomberg reports  TipRanks

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  • Climate mitigation cannot ignore local contexts

    Climate mitigation cannot ignore local contexts

    Listen to article

    It is ironic that countries and people with the lightest ecological footprints are bearing the biggest brunt of climate change. While the global community is still reeling from the rise of climate-denying politicians and struggling to shore up alternative sources of climate related financing, the way the existing climate change policies are being implemented also needs a major rethink.

    There is ample evidence to demonstrate how a lack of resources increases exposure to the consequences of climate change, and limits the ability of ordinary citizens, and even nations, to adapt to climate-related impacts. However, the climate related vulnerabilities of poor people and poorer nations are not uniform.

    Yet, the global discourse on climate change assumes that all forms of climate action invariably help poorer countries and poorer people, so everyone must play along with whatever policy prescriptions are formulated by those in positions of power. Motivated by this rationale, global institutions like World Bank, IMF and even the UN have pushed homogenous climate policies such as carbon credit schemes to deal with global warming. The lingering dependence of poorer countries on donors makes them unable to push back against one-size-fits-all prescriptions, even if such impositions do not offer locally informed choices to deal with climate change.

    The dearth of data on climate impacts within the global south also increases reliance on foreign experts, which then reinforces the use of top-down policy prescriptions. Poorer countries rely on donors not just for funding climate mitigation efforts, but also for climate-related research.

    To be effective, climate action must be anchored in domestic political realities. Without adequate local ownership, climate commitments readily dissipate when donor funding dries up. For instance, signing onto pledges to limit deforestation is not enough. Political capital is needed to conserve forests, which cannot be created by foreign experts, if, for example, illegal logging provides a source of major revenue for local communities, whose votes are vital for local politicians.

    Forest conservation also needs to recognise linkages between deforestation and subsistence farming requirements of local communities, which is also a major cause for encroachment on forest lands. Without investing in alternative sources of income, or identifying more sustainable methods of growing food, forest conservation schemes can undermine the welfare of local populations, which increases the chances of such efforts being subverted.

    To tackle the global warming crisis, climate policies in the global south need to pay greater heed to the impact of climate mitigation strategies on local communities. More effective climate policies must be rooted in the idea of improving households’ material conditions while tackling climate threats. Exacerbating marginalisation via exclusionary mitigation strategies, such as paying local elites to conserve forests for earning carbon credits, is not a viable climate strategy.

    Climate policies need to be more flexible and pay more heed to local contexts. While recognising the need for global consensus to coordinate action across different countries is important, climate policies must be participatory and be able to incorporate alternative perspectives. Building viable coalitions which can adhere to common-sense approaches to climate mitigation is more sensible.

    The tendency to consider climate policies from a myopic technocratic lens is a recipe for failure. Greater efforts must be made to anchor climate policies in the domestic politics of individual countries. International development entities spearheading climate adaptation must learn to relinquish control. And poorer countries need to proactively provide solutions of greater relevance to their local environments, and these solutions must in turn be informed by voices of specific communities in whose name climate mitigation efforts are being implemented. Meaningful climate actions cannot succeed without garnering popular support.

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  • Dollar rise against major currencies; bitcoin hits fresh record high – Reuters

    1. Dollar rise against major currencies; bitcoin hits fresh record high  Reuters
    2. The US Dollar’s Upside Correction Stalls  Forex Factory
    3. USD/JPY consolidates around 146.30 as investors seek current status of US-Japan trade talks  FXStreet
    4. Dollar Slips Amid Risk-On Rally  TradingView
    5. FX Markets Learn to Live With Tariff Uncertainty  Investing.com

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  • S&C Advises Lead Managers for Virgin Australia’s $445 Million IPO

    S&C Advises Lead Managers for Virgin Australia’s $445 Million IPO

    In the largest initial public offering of an airline in the Asia Pacific region in a decade, Virgin Australia Holdings (Virgin Australia) completed its initial public offering and listing on the Australian Securities Exchange, raising A$685 million ($445 million). 

    The IPO consisted of an offer to qualified institutional buyers in the United States pursuant to Rule 144A, an offer to eligible institutional investors in Australia and New Zealand, and a retail offer conducted outside the United States. Virgin Australia’s selling shareholder, an entity controlled by funds managed by Bain Capital, has retained 40 percent ownership of Virgin Australia following the IPO.

    Virgin Australia is Australia’s second largest airline group, providing domestic and international travel services to millions of Australian and international customers each year. 

    S&C represented the joint lead managers as their U.S. counsel on the offering, including Goldman Sachs Australia, UBS Securities Australia and Barrenjoey Markets.

    The S&C team was led by Wally Jones and Paul Rota and included Karina Poon. David Hariton advised on U.S. taxation matters.

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  • Microsoft AI predicts protein conformations

    Microsoft AI predicts protein conformations

    Credit: Frank Noé

    Microsoft’s artificial intelligence tool BioEmu can predict the multiple conformational states of a protein, giving insight into how a protein moves and its potential function.

    The way proteins move is often what gives them biological activity: they can open, close, twist, and rearrange themselves in ways that allow them to bind to other molecules or perform complex functions. Now, an artificial intelligence tool developed by Microsoft researchers can predict the multiple conformational states of proteins in minutes with a fraction of the resources required by other techniques. The tool, BioEmu, is completely open source—meaning that its associated source code, training data, model weights have been released to the public (Science 2025, DOI: 10.1126/science.adv9817).

    Frank Noé, a multidisciplinary researcher at Microsoft Research’s AI for Science lab led the work on BioEmu. He says that tools like Google DeepMind’s Nobel Prize–winning AlphaFold helped kick off the “structure revolution,” which gave scientists access to roughly 200 million computationally predicted protein structures. But those structures were static.

    To understand the movement of proteins, scientists have used experiments such as cryogenic electron microscopy to capture snapshots of the movements and molecular dynamics simulations to figure out how proteins move. But these experiments can take an enormous amount of time, money, and computational power.

    BioEmu is based on a deep learning neural network that Noé says was trained on such costly simulated and experimental data. He says some of that training data was produced by other labs and publicly available, and some training data was generated in-house.

    The training gives BioEmu the ability to make “predictions of how proteins move and about the structures they can assume in equilibrium,” Noé says. “It is the first tool that makes quantitative predictions about the relative probabilities of different states that proteins can have that underlie their function.”

    Instead of simulating how a protein moves, BioEmu emulates it, according to Noé. “Emulators behave like simulators, but they’re much faster,” he says. “They use deep learning tricks to kind of shortcut some of the very expensive numerical calculations.” BioEmu can predict the many conformational states of a protein and its free energy—a measure of a protein’s stability—with accuracy of 1 kcal/mol, which Noé describes as “experimental accuracy.”

    There exists a lot of potential utility for BioEmu in drug discovery, Noé says. The tool can help researchers find cryptic binding pockets, which could be inhibited by small molecules to reduce the activity of disease-causing proteins. But it will take time to see if that hypothetical plays out.

    Zhidian Zhang, a postdoctoral computational biologist at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology who wasn’t involved in the research, has lots of praise for BioEmu and the associated paper describing it. Several groups over the past couple of years have attempted to predict alternative conformational states of proteins, she says. But BioEmu is different in that it can predict “the distribution of different conformations, which is a much more difficult problem.”

    Alberto Perez, a computational chemist at the University of Florida who also wasn’t involved in the research, says that he can see himself using BioEmu in his own work and is thrilled that it is being released open source. “There was a lot of blowback when AlphaFold 3 didn’t publish their code, so I’m happy to see like this code will be available and accessible,” he says.

    Zhang and Perez both note that BioEmu has limitations. The algorithm works well for small proteins but struggles with larger ones, as well as with proteins that bind to ligands and membrane proteins, which are especially important as potential drug targets. It also doesn’t predict the kinetics of protein movement—how long it takes for a protein to move from one conformation to the other and in what order. The authors of the paper also acknowledge these limitations.

    Yet Zhang, Perez, and Noé also think that BioEmu’s capabilities will improve over time. “When AlphaFold first came out it was big news, but it wasn’t game changing,” Perez says. “The second time around, it was game changing.” Only time will tell if the next iteration of BioEmu will be game changing as well.

    Chemical & Engineering News

    ISSN 0009-2347

    Copyright © 2025 American Chemical Society

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  • Mike Hesson clarifies on Babar Azam wicketkeeping suggestion rumours

    Mike Hesson clarifies on Babar Azam wicketkeeping suggestion rumours

    Pakistan white-ball coach Mike Hesson has dismissed rumours suggesting he advised Babar Azam to take up wicketkeeping in order to regain his place in the national T20I team.

    The 30-year-old Babar was left out of Pakistan’s squad for the upcoming T20I series against Bangladesh later this month.

    Following reports that Hesson had recommended Babar keep wickets, several former players – including Rashid Latif, Basit Ali, Mohsin Khan, Moin Khan, and Sikander Bakht – voiced criticism.

    “They are being very unfair with Babar, (Mohammad) Rizwan and Shaheen (Afridi) but I can assure you these three will be back soon,” Basit said.

    However, Hesson clarified that no such conversation took place and reaffirmed that if Babar returns to the T20I side, it would be as an opener.

    “No discussion took place with Babar where I suggested he also keep wickets. He has never kept wickets in his entire career and you suggest he keeps wickets. This is not the way to treat a former captain and senior,” Hesson told the reporters, PTI reported.

    Hesson also denied reports claiming he told players that anyone not batting with a strike rate above 150 would be dropped from the team. He clarified that no such conversations have taken place. However, he emphasised that Pakistan’s batters need to improve certain aspects of their game to meet the demands of modern-day T20 cricket.

    “I have also not told the players that if they want to keep their places in the team they have to bat at strike rates of over 150. We are working on some things in this direction,” Hesson added.

    He further stated that he is currently working closely with the selectors to develop a young T20 side built around a specific approach suited to the format.

    “We are looking at players who are ready to float in the batting order and perform multiple roles but that does not mean there will be no spot for specialist players,” Hesson added.

    Pakistan’s T20I series against Bangladesh starts on July 20 with all matches scheduled to take place at the Sher-e-Bangla National Stadium in Mirpur.

    – Ends

    Published By:

    sabyasachi chowdhury

    Published On:

    Jul 11, 2025

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  • Scientists discover that mysterious giant structures beneath the North Sea seemingly defy what we know about geology

    Scientists discover that mysterious giant structures beneath the North Sea seemingly defy what we know about geology

    Giant sand mounds beneath the North Sea have puzzled scientists for years. Now, researchers have discovered that these mysterious structures were created by a geological process that has never been seen on such a huge scale.

    Seismic data and rock samples from the northern North Sea, off the coast of Norway, suggest that these miles-wide mounds sank millions of years ago, lifting up older, less-dense “ooze” beneath. The findings could help scientists learn more about future carbon storage options, the researchers wrote in the new study, which was published June 21 in the journal Communications Earth and Environment.

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  • Sensational sweeps: Ethiopia in the women’s 5000m at the 2005 World Championships | News | Tokyo 25

    Sensational sweeps: Ethiopia in the women’s 5000m at the 2005 World Championships | News | Tokyo 25

    As the countdown to the World Athletics Championships Tokyo 25 continues, we shine a spotlight on some of the podium sweeps that have lit up past editions of the global showpiece.

    This five-part series launches with a look back at Ethiopia’s dominance in the women’s 5000m in Helsinki in 2005.

    ——

    The 2005 World Athletics Championships in Helsinki, Finland, holds particular significance in the history of sweeps. Not only were podium sweeps achieved in three events, but in two of those – the women’s 5000m and the men’s 200m – the top four spots were secured by athletes from the same nation: a feat never before achieved at the World Championships.

    After leading an all-Ethiopian podium in the women’s 10,000m, Tirunesh Dibaba returned to head the first ever women’s World Championships 1-2-3-4 in the 5000m. At the age of 19, she became the first woman to complete the 5000m and 10,000m double.

    As well as making history with its ‘foursweep’ and Dibaba double, the women’s 5000m featured one of the best rivalries in women’s international long-distance running. While notable Ethiopian women came before and after Dibaba and Meseret Defar, their legacies carry weight in the country today as thousands of young women began running after seeing their success on television or hearing about it on the radio.

    The women’s 5000m final at the 2005 World Championships in Helsinki (© Getty Images)

    After winning her first world 5000m title as a 17-year-old in Paris in 2003, Dibaba eyed the double in Helsinki. First up was the 10,000m final on 6 August, which she won ahead of her compatriots Berhane Adere and Ejegayehu Dibaba, Tirunesh’s older sister. Many, however, were more excited for her face off against Defar in the 5000m. Defar wanted to claim the world title in her Olympic gold medal event, and Dibaba wanted to become the first woman to prevail in both the 5000m – for which she had a wild card entry as the defending champion – and the 10,000m.

    The early stages of the race were conservative, with China’s Sun Yingjie leading the charge. The field passed through 3000m in 8:52.62 and 4000m in 11:52.40. Conserving their energy, the four Ethiopian athletes in the race began to break away from the rest of the pack throughout the last kilometre. Defar took the lead with 400 metres to go, and Tirunesh unleashed a final kick over the last 150 metres to win in a championship record of 14:38.59. Defar finished second in 14:39.54, Ejegayehu Dibaba in third in 14:42.47 and Meselech Melkamu in fourth in 14:43.47.

    Ejegayehu Dibaba, Meseret Defar, Tirunesh Dibaba and Meselech Melkamu in Helsinki

    Ejegayehu Dibaba, Meseret Defar, Tirunesh Dibaba and Meselech Melkamu in Helsinki (© Getty Images)

    This top four sweep did more than just cement Ethiopia’s women’s distance runners as a dominant force. It also paved the way for the Defar-Dibaba rivalry to ramp up even further in the following years. In 2006, the two met seven times. Tirunesh won four of them, but Defar led the overall count at that point and beat her rival for the Golden League victory. In Ethiopia, houses and neighbourhoods became divided as the country’s athletics fans watch the two duel it out on a frequent basis. Defar set the first of her two world 5000m records in 2006 and a few years later, Tirunesh lowered it to 14:11.15 – a mark that stood for 12 years. 

    The two would go on to win several more world and Olympic medals, and ultimately faced each other 32 times in their careers – Defar winning 19 times to Tirunesh’s 13. 

    While fierce rivals, they collectively – together with the other women who joined them on multiple major podiums – cemented Ethiopian women’s running as a deep force to be reckoned with on the global stage.

    Hannah Borenstein for World Athletics

     

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  • Elucidating the Role of MicroRNAs in Regulating Insulin Signaling Pathways: Implications for the Pathophysiology and Treatment of Type 2 Diabetes

    Elucidating the Role of MicroRNAs in Regulating Insulin Signaling Pathways: Implications for the Pathophysiology and Treatment of Type 2 Diabetes


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