By Walt Hickey

Gene Therapy

Gene therapies are medical treatments where a patient’s DNA is changed to repair mutations that might cause disease. They’re still pretty cutting-edge, but after a surge in interest that peaked with $3.3 billion invested in gene therapy startups in 2020, venture capital has dried up, with only $400 million plunged into gene therapy startups so far this year. All told, among the publicly traded gene treatment companies, their value is down 63 percent compared to a peak in 2021, wiping out some $250 billion in aggregate value. At issue isn’t necessarily the science, but more the business; a genetic therapy can take hundreds of millions of dollars and years of work to produce, some clinical trials have failed, and insurers have resisted paying for some of the treatments given that they’re one-time treatments with significant up-front costs.

Gerry Smith, Bloomberg

Charles Entertainment Cheese

Four years ago, the parent company of Chuck E. Cheese filed for bankruptcy, and after a $350 million investment, the iconic rat is back on its feet and doing pretty well. It’s expanded beyond shoddy pizza and wings for children and expanded to mediocre food for parents as well, capitalizing on the pandemic-era grift where they pretended they were a pizza restaurant called Pasqually’s Pizza and Wings on mobile food-ordering apps to take that slightly improved kitchen into their actual business. Last month they offered a promotion with unlimited monthly membership to Chuck E. Cheese for $7.99, with some 350,000 Summer Fun Passes sold. One must simply admire the gumption and perseverance of a restaurant whose front man is actual vermin.

Satyne Doner, QSR Magazine

Albums

Several labels with virtually no online presence uploaded scores of junk albums to Spotify and dragged popular artists into it this fall, which pushed the fake albums onto real artists’ pages in order to squeeze unsuspecting listens out of them. This included 240 albums uploaded on Friday from the seemingly nonexistent Beat Street Music, 471 albums from Ancient Lake Records, 483 albums from Gupta Music earlier that week, and then 600 fake albums from Future Jazz Records. Spotify was alerted to the issue and is reportedly considering its options.

Ashley Belanger, Ars Technica

Folk

Researchers analyzed 300 audio recordings of folk songs from 75 collaborators across 55 languages to figure out what traditional music has in common the world over. In general, the instrumental pitches tended to be considerably higher than the sung lyrics, evoking that high-pitched twang of this kind of music. The songs also tended to be slower than speech. A key goal of this was to figure out what the connection is between singing and speaking anyway, and whether singing is a product of speech, vice versa, or if they’re different phenomena entirely. This study — which found lots of inconsistency between sung folk songs and spoken versions of them — suggests that singing is not a byproduct of speech.

Allison Parshall, Duncan Geere and Miriam Quick, Scientific American

Tom

In a result that shows Tom Brady will never stop shredding New York Jets defenses, the NFL ownership unanimously agreed, 32-0, to approve the sale of a portion of the Las Vegas Raiders to former quarterback and likely briefly NFL commentator Tom Brady. According to people familiar with the deal, Brady’s going to own about 5 percent of the Raiders, a team against which he was 6-1 in his playing days. In most ways, this is good for nobody: The other teams have to deal with the possibility of yet again losing to Tom Brady forever, the current Raiders ownership needs to rid their facilities of tomatoes forever, and Tom Brady needs to hang out with Mark Davis for the rest of his natural life.

Eben Novy-Williams, Sportico

Wine

Sales of wine fell 8 percent in the fiscal year ending in August, a rough spell that was particularly noticed in premium wines over $100, which saw a 12.5 percent decline over the year. Not all was grim in the fermented grape world: Prosecco sales were up 2 percent, and the middle of the shelf was doing pretty dang good, with domestic mid-tiers over $50 up 3 percent. Wine’s being beset on all sides, with the rise of sober-curious types eating into potential customers and spirits-based beverages becoming popular and taking market share as well.

Chris Casey, Food Dive

Eggs

Cage-free eggs have risen sharply in popularity, rising from 5 percent of hens in 2012 to 40 percent of the U.S. flock as of March 2024. Cage-free is far from perfect, but egg producers appear to be preparing for it to be the dominant form of egg in the future. Multiple states are preparing bans on eggs from hens housed in the conventional factory environment, California’s already required eggs to be from cage-free hens, and the latest news is that Cal-Maine, the largest egg producer in the United States, is investing $40 million to ramp up cage-free egg production and build five new facilities to house 1 million cage-free hens by next summer.

Sarah Zimmerman, Food Dive

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