Through spatial multiomics, spatial stable isotope tracing and retrospective cohort analyses, this study identifies hyperglycosylation as a driver of Alzheimer’s disease and a promising therapeutic target.
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Respiratory Viruses Wake Up Dormant Cancer Cells
Cancer remission, in which tumor cells enter a dormant state and a patient’s symptoms subside, can persist for years or decades.1 Both the cancer cells themselves and the tumor microenvironment maintain this period of inactivity.2 While inflammation has been shown to disrupt this microenvironment, leading to metastasis, the mechanisms of this process remain unclear.
Seeing a trend in increased cancer deaths in the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, cancer biologists Julio Aguirre-Ghiso at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and James DeGregori at the University of Colorado suspected that viral infections could be activating dormant cancer cells. In partnership with researchers at Utrecht University, the teams showed that inflammation from viral infections activated dormant cancer cells and increased metastasis.3 The findings, published in Nature, provide important insights into cancer remission for clinicians.
“Dormant cancer cells are like the embers left in an abandoned campfire, and respiratory viruses are like a strong wind that reignites the flames,” DeGregori said in a press release about the study findings.
Faulty protein cleanup gene tied to severe early-onset neurological disorders
Though protein clumps associated with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s were discovered more than a century ago, researchers remain largely unable to prevent them from forming or eliminate them from the brain. And though a variety of therapies have taken aim at tau tangles, beta-amyloid plaques and Lewy bodies, among other notorious aggregates, none have been very effective at stopping disease progression.
Rockefeller’s Hermann Steller and his team in the Strang Laboratory of Apoptosis and Cancer Biology have long been focused on understanding how the cell’s protein-degrading machines, called proteasomes, are regulated. His lab discovered that a transporter protein termed PI31 shuttles proteasomes over long distances from the nerve cell body to synapses. When this system fails, synapses become depleted of degradative capacity, and proteins that should have been eliminated accumulate. As a result, synaptic communication breaks down, protein clumps form and neuronal health deteriorates.
Now a new study in Nature Communications, led by researchers from University College London and contributed to by Steller’s lab, has identified mutations in PSMF1, the gene that produces PI31, that cause the protein to malfunction. Moreover, the scientists demonstrated that these mutations cause a spectrum of severe, very early-onset neurological disorders.
A Supplement For Joint Pain Could Accelerate Alzheimer’s Memory Loss
People with Alzheimer’s disease who took the common supplement glucosamine were 25% more likely to die within five years than those who didn’t.
That’s the key finding of a new study that my colleagues and I published in the journal Nature Metabolism.
Glucosamine is a sugar molecule that’s sold over the counter as a remedy for joint pain and arthritis. More than 40 million Americans take it each year.
Why birds ignore Newton: New theory could sharpen models of flocks, crowds and cells
Birds in flocks, bacteria and cells: In many collective systems, individual elements respond to only part of their surroundings, seemingly defying Newton’s third law of motion—action equals reaction. These exceptions are known as nonreciprocal interactions. A Dresden physics team working with Roderich Moessner, a founding member of the Würzburg–Dresden Cluster of Excellence ctd.qmat, has now developed a theory that makes it possible to describe these interactions efficiently and simulate them far more precisely.
AI Misbehavior Is No Longer Confined to the Lab
Further Reading.
Thumbail original image used credit: Adobe Stock Image.
Graph from: Scheming in the wild: detecting real-world AI scheming incidents with open-source intelligence.
Shutdown resistance in reasoning models.
https://palisaderesearch.org/blog/shu…
Natural emergent misalignment from reward hacking in production RL
https://arxiv.org/html/2511.18397v1
Scheming in the wild: detecting real-world AI scheming incidents with open-source intelligence.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.
[CRITICAL Security Issue/Bug] Plan mode restrictions bypassed when spawning sub-agents #6527
https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode…
#explained.
#science #artificialintelligence #tech #misalignment