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The cloning industry is contractingironically, perhaps. On Tuesday, Colossal Biosciences announced that it has acquired ViaGen Pets and Equine, an animal cloning firm, marking Colossals first acquisition since it launched in 2021. Texas-based Colossal Biosciences is best known for its controversial “de-extinction” endeavors, which involve efforts to recover species that have died out. Earlier this year, the company claimed to have “brought back” dire wolves, an assertion that was disputed by some experts, as the animals were created by modifying the DNA of existing gray wolves. The company has also sparked debates about the ethics of bringing species back from extinction, or if what it’s doing is in fact de-extinction at all. Either way, Colossal has attracted significant interest from high-powered investors, recently raising $120 million to try and resurrect the dodo. Its acquisition of ViaGen adds even more genetic firepower to its arsenal. Colossal is thrilled to welcome ViaGen, the worlds leading cloning company, into our portfolio, said Ben Lamm, founder and CEO of Colossal, in a statement provided to Fast Company. No other company comes close to what ViaGen has achieved. Their unmatched expertise and cloning technology stack have become the worlds standard and their application of these critical and proprietary technologies to endangered species conservation makes them an invaluable partner in advancing our global de-extinction and species preservation mission. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Access to breakthrough technologies ViaGen, a Texas-based company founded in 2002, will continue to operate under its existing leadership and expand its endangered species cloning activity. Perhaps the most interesting element at play is ViaGens exclusive licensing and access to the breakthrough technologies developed by the Roslin Institute of Edinburghsuch as those that cloned Dolly the sheep, the first cloned mammal. Partnering with Colossal Biosciences presents an extraordinary opportunity to apply our advanced cryopreservation and cloning techniques to the ambitious goals of de-extinction and species restoration, said Dr. Shawn Walker, Ph.D., ViaGens chief science officer and known cloning expert, in a statement. Colossal has also attracted a stable of celebrity investors. Retired NFL star Tom Brady, for instance, worked with the company to clone his familys dog, and said in a statement that he is excited how Colossal and ViaGen’s tech together can help both families losing their beloved pets while helping to save endangered species. The potential to save endangered species is something that has others excited, too. Colossal shared a statement from filmmaker Peter Jackson, who said, These two companies together give humanity a real shot at saving the planet’s biodiversity.
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Denny’s said Monday that it’s being acquired by a group of investors in a deal that will take the breakfast chain private.Denny’s board unanimously approved the deal, which values Denny’s at $620 million including debt. Denny’s will be purchased by private equity investment company TriArtisan Capital Advisors, investment firm Treville Capital and Yadav Enterprises, which is one of Denny’s largest franchisees.Under the agreement, Denny’s shareholders will receive $6.25 per share in cash for each share of Denny’s common stock they own, or a total of $322 million. That represents a 52% premium to Denny’s closing stock price Monday.Denny’s shares jumped 47% in after-hours trading Monday.Denny’s was founded in 1953 in Lakewood, California, as Danny’s Donuts. The name was changed to Denny’s Coffee Shops in 1959 to avoid confusion with another chain. Denny’s began trading on the New York Stock Exchange in 1969.Like many casual chains, Denny’s saw its sales plummet during the COVID pandemic. Once the pandemic eased, it found itself dealing with changing customer dining patterns, including a heavier reliance on delivery. Denny’s has also struggled as newer chains like First Watch promoted healthier breakfast options.Last fall, Denny’s said it planned to close 150 of its lowest-performing locations. At the end of the second quarter, Denny’s had 1,558 restaurants worldwide, including 1,422 Denny’s restaurants and 74 Keke’s restaurants. Denny’s acquired the Keke’s brand in 2022.Denny’s CEO Kelli Valade said the company reached out to more than 40 potential buyers and received multiple offers. Valade said Denny’s board believed the deal announced Monday was in the best interest of shareholders and the best path forward for the company.TriArtisan Co-Founder and Managing Director Rhohit Manocha called Denny’s “an iconic piece of the American dream” with a strong franchise base and loyal customers.“We look forward to working with Kelli and the rest of the Denny’s team and franchisees to provide resources and support the Company’s long-term strategic growth plans,” Manocha said in a statement.If it’s accepted by Denny’s shareholders, the deal is expected to close in the first quarter of 2026. Dee-Ann Durbin, AP Business Writer
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A new open AI platform from the nonprofit created by the late Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen aims to make satellite imagery and other data about the earth more available and useful. The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (Ai2) on Tuesday unveiled the OlmoEarth Platform, backed by a family of AI foundation models trained on roughly 10 terabytes of data derived from millions of observations of the planet, including satellite images, radar readings, and existing maps of features like forest cover. The OlmoEarth models can then be fine-tuned for specific purposes, like detecting changes in vegetation, with the help of a companion software tool called OlmoEarth Studio. Details on model performance are included in a new scientific paper. Ai2 has already been working with a variety of organizations harnessing the AI, including groups looking to better assess and respond to wildfire risk. The International Food Policy Research Institute is using the technology to more frequently update maps of crops grown in one region of Kenya. Amazon Conservation is using the AI system to quickly spot deforestation. And a project called Global Mangrove Watch is harnessing the technology to more comprehensively track mangrove populations and quickly detect threats to those critical coastline trees. Patrick Beukema, lead researcher on Ai2s OlmoEarth team, says the project grew out of a realization that while AI can help put earth imagery and data to use by quickly analyzing both new and historic images, actually deploying the technology could be a challenge for many organizations, including government agencies and nonprofits doing important work. I think there’s a recognition that this kind of technology can be very valuable, but it’s so difficult to use, so we haven’t seen widespread adoption of these kinds of models, as we’ve seen, for example, within natural language processing or with [large-language models], he says. And we haven’t really seen the transformative power of artificial intelligence within this domain. State-of-the-artTo fill that gap, Ai2 created not only what Beukema calls state-of-the-art models, built using vision transformer technology similar to the large-language models that power tools like ChatGPT and Claude, but a set of companion tools making them practical to use. Those include OlmoEarth Studio, which simplifies the process of training the models for specific tasks by uploading human-labelled sample data showing relevant features like lands growing specific crops, areas of mangroves, or bits of forest vulnerable to wildfire. [Animation: Ai2]Once OlmoEarth models are fine-tuned, they can be used to analyze areas of the earth at a particular moment in time, selected as easily as finding a neighborhood on Google Maps and scheduling an event on a calendar app. They can just tell the system, ‘I want mangroves, I want them in Indonesia over the last six months,’ or ‘I want a global inference over the last four years,’ Beukema says. The idea is to build in that flexibility so that users can choose whatever they need. Then, users can publish or privately share maps illustrating their findings, which can be viewed in an OlmoEarth Viewer app that can support interactive maps with options to select places and time ranges. The Studio and Viewer tools can be used without the need to write any code, though Ai2 also released a suite of automation tools and APIs for easy programming of its technology. Providing the toolsThe organization also released documentation and examples on its GitHub page for the project, along with existing fine-tuned models that can immediately be put to use or even run offline on an organizations own computers. And OlmoEarth follows other recent software releases from Ai2, including a package of science-focused AI tools called Asta released in August, and a set of language models known as OLMo, for open language models. [Animation: Ai2]Overall, Beukema says, the goal with OlmoEarth is to give organizations free technology that compares favorably to existing commercial and academic AI projects, letting them efficiently analyze and visualize planetary data they often already deeply understand, even when they dont have the resources to build their own AI models from scratch. These people are often experts, so they know exactly what they’re looking for, he says. They just don’t necessarily have, or want to build, these complicated foundation models that are expensive to train, expensive to inference, expensive to really work with. [Animation: Ai2]Global Mangrove Watchwhich tracks those coastal trees that are environmentally important as fish habitats, carbon stores, and as barriers to erosion, storm surge, and even tsunamisis already working to improve its mapping and analysis processes with OlmoEarth. An existing machine learning and mapping system could already track mangroves with relatively high accuracy, but organizing training data and verifying the output still requires a lot of manual labor, says Lammert Hilarides, senior technical officer at Wetlands International, one of the organizations behind Global Mangrove Watch. A plan to scale upHilarides says OlmoEarth should allow the organizations to spend more time on other tasks, including working with governments and organizations around the world that are working to preserve mangroves and protect them from often-illegal deforestation. Critically, it will allow the project to update mangrove loss maps more quickly and let them cover a greater extent of the planet, catching disturbances to mangroves faster and more comprehensively. We really hope that as of next year, we can scale up our work from covering not just half the worlds mangroves but all of the worlds mangroves, he says. Ai2 plans to make OlmoEarth accessible to a wide range of organizations, with most features free for anyone to use, though a few features like fine-tuning elements will generally require groups to coordinate with Ai2 to make sure the product isnt used for harmful purposes. Beukema says the nonprofit institute encourages organizations that think the technology could be useful to be in contact. If you think this tech is going to help you accelerate your mission, please reach out, he says. We really want to help you.
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