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"Fnord666" writes:

Ollama Out-of-Bounds Read Vulnerability Allows Remote Process Memory Leak:

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a critical security vulnerability in Ollama that, if successfully exploited, could allow a remote, unauthenticated attacker to leak its entire process memory.

The out-of-bounds read flaw, which likely impacts over 300,000 servers globally, is tracked as CVE-2026-7482 (CVSS score: 9.1). It has been codenamed Bleeding Llama by Cyera.

Ollama is a popular open-source framework that allows large language models (LLMs) to be run locally instead of on the cloud. On GitHub, the project has more than 171,000 stars and has been forked over 16,100 times.

"Ollama before 0.17.1 contains a heap out-of-bounds read vulnerability in the GGUF model loader," according to a description of the flaw in CVE.org. "The /api/create endpoint accepts an attacker-supplied GGUF file in which the declared tensor offset and size exceed the file's actual length; during quantization in fs/ggml/gguf.go and server/quantization.go (WriteTo()), the server reads past the allocated heap buffer."

GGUF, short for GPT-Generated Unified Format, is a file format that's used to store large language models so that they can be easily loaded and executed locally. It's analogous to other popular model saving formats like PyTorch .pt/.pth (based on Python's pickle module), safetensors, and Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX).

The problem, at its core, stems from Ollama's use of the unsafe package when creating a model from a GGUF file, specifically in a function named "WriteTo()," thereby making it possible to execute operations that bypass the memory safety guarantees of the programming language.

In a hypothetical attack scenario, a bad actor can send a specially crafted GGUF file to an exposed Ollama server with the tensor's shape set to a very large number to trigger the out-of-bounds heap read during model creation using the /api/create endpoint. Successful exploitation of the vulnerability could leak sensitive data from the Ollama process memory.

This may include environment variables, API keys, system prompts, and concurrent users' conversation data. This data can be exfiltrated by uploading the resulting model artifact through the /api/push endpoint to an attacker-controlled registry.

[...] "On top of that, engineers often connect Ollama to tools like Claude Code. In those cases, the impact is even higher – all tool outputs flow to the Ollama server, get saved in the heap, and potentially end up in an attacker's hands."

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.engadget.com/2174433/nasa-psyche-spacecraft-got-an-assist-from-mars-on-way-to-asteroid/

NASA's Psyche spacecraft has just flown closer to Mars than the planet's own moons en route to the metallic asteroid 16 Psyche. It was a planned maneuver so that the spacecraft can get gravity assist from the red planet and conserve fuel, specifically the xenon gas propellant its solar-electric ion thruster system uses. The flyby gave Psyche a speed boost and changed its trajectory so that it's now aligned with its target asteroid's orbit around the sun.

With a speed of 12,300 mph, Psyche passed within 2,800 miles of the planet in its closest approach at approximately half past 3PM Eastern time on May 15. The Martian moon Phobos orbits the planet from 3,700 miles away, while the moon Deimos is much farther away and is located 12,470 miles above the planet's surface.

Psyche has been approaching Mars since early May and has been taking photos of the planet. From the angle of its approach, the planet appeared as a bright, thin crescent, as its surface and the dust particles around it reflect light from the sun. Psyche's cameras took more images during its flyby, and it will beam them back over the coming days and weeks via the giant antennas of NASA's Deep Space Network. Those images will be uploaded to the mission's official page.

Psyche started its six-year, 2.2-billion-mile journey towards its namesake asteroid in late 2023. It's expected to reach its destination in July 2029 and to start working on its objectives the next month. The spacecraft will spend two years orbiting the asteroid "to take pictures, map the surface and collect data to determine Psyche's composition."

Scientists think that Psyche, the largest known metallic asteroid in our solar system, could be part of the iron-rich core of a planetesimal. That's the solid building block of a planet formed in the early days of the solar system. As such, it could offer us insight into the core of our own planet and show us how it formed. "We can't bore a path to Earth's metal core — or the cores of the other rocky planets — so visiting Psyche could provide a one-of-a-kind window into the violent history of collisions and accumulation of matter that created planets like our own," NASA explained.

Details: https://t.co/v4t8DRi6XW

— NASA Solar System (@NASASolarSystem) May 15, 2026

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/big-tech/texas-county-passes-data-center-moratorium-for-a-year-follows-other-local-governments-pausing-similar-projects-but-state-senator-says-counties-cannot-impose-these-bans

AI hyperscalers are increasingly looking to unincorporated county land to reduce regulatory friction, allowing them to get their projects online much quicker. While they still have to go through county commissions and other authorities that work at the county level, they get to skip city-level rules and debates, which can get testy at times.

However, it seems that some county officials are catching on with this pattern and are actively moving to block or at least delay these power-hungry projects. This is especially true as an increasing number of Americans are opposing the construction of these AI data centers in their neighborhood. “The data center folks have found a sweet spot in the state that has limited regulations, limited enforcement, limited code, and they’re coming faster than we can keep up with,” Hill County Commissioner Jim Holcomb told the publication. “I think it’s imperative … that we tap the brakes and we get our arms around what we’re faced with and do the research, do the studies.”

One of the biggest issues that communities have around data centers is the increased power rates caused by the power-hungry infrastructure. The U.S. power grid companies are upgrading their infrastructure to handle the increased loads that AI infrastructure demands, but these expenses are evenly distributed to all ratepayers. This meant that even residential users and small businesses are slapped with higher utility bills, with electricity costs across the U.S. rising by more than 30% since 2020. In fact, the state of Maryland complained to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) after PJM Connection, LLC., the grid operator for the state (and 12 others), slapped it with a $2 billion bill to be passed on to all consumers for its grid upgrade costs.

Some projects are bypassing the electricity grid problem by building their own power. One data center project in Utah plans to use this approach by running entirely off-grid using natural gas. However, residents are concerned about the potential air pollution that such an operation could bring, especially as the site has a 9GW capacity — more than twice the amount of power that the entire state needs. Some people are also complaining about the noise pollution that these sites can bring, as well as raising issues about inaudible but “felt” infrasound that is suspected of causing adverse health effects.

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/05/cell-phones-users-cant-stop-incriminating-themselves/

"What kind of doctor was dr. pepper," Utah real estate agent Kouri Richins once asked a search engine. (Sadly, there was no actual Dr. Pepper.)

But it was Richins' less innocuous online searches that helped a jury find her guilty of murdering her husband Eric via fentanyl overdose—and of hoping to collect life insurance policies she had opened in his name but without his knowledge.
[...]
it was her second iPhone that really made headlines. In April 2022, Kouri bought a replacement for her seized device and soon began searching for things which, at the very least, looked suspicious. Here are the five searches prosecutors decided to present to the jury during opening statements (which you can still watch on CourtTV) at Kouri's trial earlier this year:

• "can you delete everytginv off an old iphind without actually having ut" [sic throughout]
• "can deleted text messages be retrieved from an iphone"
• "how.to.compleltley.wipe.a.iphkne.clear remotely"
• "can cops force you to do a lie detector test"
• "women utah prison"

[...]
The New York Times notes that a "forensic analysis of burner phones used by Ms. Richins showed searches for... 'how long does life insurance companies takento.pay' and 'what is a lethal.does.of.fetanyl.'"
[...]
And a local news channel said that she had accessed articles called "Signs of Being Under Federal Investigation" and "Delay in Claim Payment for Death Certificate with Pending Cause of Death."
[...]
In HBO's The Wire, criminal mastermind Stringer Bell famously had the good sense to know that one should not be "taking notes on a criminal fucking conspiracy." But in case after case (after case!) that I cover, this is a lesson that defendants simply seem not to learn. Many will blab specific and even lurid details of their alleged crimes into search engines, text messages, and now AI tools.
[...]
there was the strange 2024 case from Minnesota in which Samantha Petersen, high on meth, hit an Amish buggy with her car.
[...]
The evidence against Samantha included, as usual, phone information, which revealed Internet searches for "what happens if you get in an accident with an Amish buggy and kill two people" and "if you hit a buggy and kill two people are you going to prison?"

Thanks to other phone data, this wasn't a particularly tough case to crack.
[...]
Petersen pleaded guilty in 2025 and was later sentenced to four years in prison.
[...]
Examples can be multiplied almost infinitely.

hubie writes:

Humans' exposure to high temperature burn injuries may have played an important role in our evolutionary development, shaping how our bodies heal, fight infection, and sometimes fail under extreme injury, according to new research:

For more than one million years, the control of fire has powered human success, from cooking and heating to technology and industry, driving genetic and cultural evolution and setting us apart from all other species. But this relationship has also exposed humans to high temperature injuries at a scale unmatched in the natural world.

Humans burn themselves – and survive burns – with a frequency likely much greater than any other animal. Most animals avoid fire completely, while in contrast, humans live alongside fire and most humans will experience minor burns throughout their lives.

A new study published in BioEssays, led by Imperial College London researchers, suggests that this increased exposure to burn injuries may have driven notable genetic adaptations which differentiated humans from other primates and mammals. This may also explain both beneficial and maladaptive responses to severe burn injury.

Burn injuries exist on a spectrum of severity, with most small injuries healing on their own while severe burns can lead to lifelong disability or death. Burns damage the skin, the body's main protective barrier against infection, sometimes over large areas of the body. The longer the skin is damaged, the greater the risk that bacteria can enter the body and cause overwhelming infection.

The researchers argue that natural selection would have favoured traits that helped humans survive small to moderate burns. These may include faster inflammation, faster wound closure (to prevent infection) and stronger pain signals.

However, while these traits are helpful for less severe injuries, they can become harmful for large burns, which may explain why modern humans can experience extreme inflammation, scarring, and organ failure from major burns.

Using comparative genomic data across primates, the researchers found examples of genes associated with burn injury responses which show signs of accelerated evolution in humans. These genes are involved in wound closure, inflammation and immune system response – likely helping to rapidly close wounds and fight infection; a major complication after burn injury, particularly before the widespread use of antibiotics.

canopic jug writes:

El País has a short interview with Vint Cerf about his thoughts on the Internet and speculation about the future. He has been there since the beginning when, among other things, he and Robert Kahn developed TCP/IP.

Vinton Cerf: 'I refuse to take responsibility for those who abuse my beautiful internet'

Previously:
(2023) Vint Cerf on 3 Mistakes He Made in TCP/IP
(2023) IEEE Medal of Honor Goes to Vint Cerf
(2020) On the Disappearance of Open Access Journals Over Time
(2018) Vint Cerf: Internet is Losing its Memory - SoylentNews
(2016) Vint Cerf's Dream Do-Over: 2 Ways He'd Make the Internet Different
(2015) Interplanetary Internet about as Useful as Flying Pigs says Vint Cerf

Original Submission

ted-ious writes:

65% of U.S. doctors reportedly use OpenEvidence, which is supported in part by pharmaceutical ads:

How would you like it if, when stumped or just in need of some help with an unfamiliar situation, your doctor consulted a free, ad-supported AI chatbot? That's not actually a hypothetical. They probably are doing that, a new report from NBC News says.

It's called OpenEvidence, and NBC says it was "used by about 65% of U.S. doctors across almost 27 million clinical encounters in April alone." An earlier Bloomberg report on OpenEvidence from seven months ago said it had signed up 50% of American doctors at the time—so reported growth is rapid.

The OpenEvidence homepage trumpets the bot as "America's Official Medical Knowledge Platform," and says healthcare professionals qualify for unlimited free use, but non-doctors can try it for free without creating accounts. It gives long, detailed answers with extensive citations that superficially look—to me, a non-doctor—trustworthy and credible.

NBC interviewed doctors for its story, and apparently pressed them on how often they actually click those links to the sources of information, and "most said they only do so when they get an unexpected result," NBC's report says.

While it's free, OpenEvidence is not a charity. It's a Miami-headquartered tech unicorn with a billionaire founder named David Nadler, and as of January it boasted a $12 billion valuation. NBC says it's backed by some of the all stars of Sand Hill Road: Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, along with Google Ventures, Thrive Capital, and Nvidia.

And its revenue comes from ads (for now), which NBC says are often for "pharmaceutical and medical device companies."

[...] At a recent doctor's appointment, my doctor asked my permission to use an AI tool on their phone (I don't know if it was OpenEvidence). I didn't know what to say other than yes. Do I want that for my doctor's appointment? Not especially. But if my doctor has come to rely on a tool like this, then what am I supposed to do? Take away their crutch?

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Citizens complain high- and low-frequency sounds do not register on decibel meters but cause adverse health effects:

Data center projects have faced resistance from residents and communities over their impact on power prices, but another complaint is being raised more frequently — noise pollution. One form of sound pollution is called infrasound, which is inaudible to humans but can be felt, and some claim it causes headaches, insomnia, nausea, and anxiety. Then there's the normal garden-variety sound pollution. The Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI), a non-profit organization, said that high- and low-frequency sounds emitted by these industrial sites can be heard and felt for hundreds of feet in surrounding areas, with noise levels reaching as high as 96dB for 24 hours a day and seven days a week.

Infrasound is another complaint that researchers are studying. Heatmap Plus reports that this is the phenomenon of frequencies so low they’re inaudible to humans. Nevertheless, some people can feel it, and there have been claims linking them to various negative health effects such as headaches, insomnia, nausea, and anxiety. Infrasound and its effects need further study, but it’s one of the issues local governments have been raising as they place a moratorium on data center projects. [...]

Normal noise pollution remains an issue, and communities living near off-grid data centers that generate their own power have it the worst. These sites generate their own power, typically using natural-gas-powered turbines — essentially jet engines bolted to the floor and used to turn generators that produce electricity. Aside from pollution concerns, such as those raised by residents around Elon Musk’s Colossus Supercomputer, which used over 30 mobile gas turbines for power, these turbines can be as loud as a passenger jet, making the site sound as loud as an airport. What’s worse is that, unlike backup generators, which only operate occasionally, these machines run continuously, meaning nearby communities will lose the peace of the neighborhood as long as these data centers operate.

[...] The United States does not lack flat, open land away from population centers on which to build data centers. However, AI hyperscalers prefer to locate their campuses near existing infrastructure so they don’t have to spend massive amounts of time and resources building everything from scratch. A few data centers are being built on former industrial sites, like shuttered factories and abandoned paper mills, but there are not enough of these around for the number of projects being proposed and built. As the negative effects of building these sites too close to population centers are slowly being revealed, we expect opposition to these projects to keep increasing.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Tiny molecules in the blood can strongly predict short-term survival in older adults:

As people get older, it can be difficult to tell who is likely to remain healthy and who may face a higher risk of serious decline. New research suggests that clues to that risk may already be present in the blood.

A study led by Duke Health, in collaboration with the University of Minnesota, found that small RNA molecules called piRNAs can help predict whether older adults are likely to live at least two more years.

Published in Aging Cell, the findings suggest that a simple blood test could eventually help doctors identify short-term survival risks earlier and guide strategies aimed at healthier aging.

“The combination of just a few piRNAs was the strongest predictor of two-year survival in older adults—stronger than age, lifestyle habits, or any other health measures we examined,” said Virginia Byers Kraus, M.D., Ph.D., senior author of the study and professor in the departments of Medicine, Pathology, and Orthopaedic Surgery at Duke University School of Medicine. “What surprised us most was that this powerful signal came from a simple blood test,” Kraus said.

The team analyzed piRNAs in blood samples from adults aged 71 and older and found that lower levels of certain piRNAs were closely associated with longer survival. Earlier studies have shown that these small RNA fragments help regulate development, regeneration, and immune activity.

[...] Older adults who survived longer consistently had lower levels of specific piRNAs, matching a pattern previously seen in simple organisms, where reducing these molecules can extend lifespan. Kraus said the results raise the possibility that piRNAs may play a direct role in longevity.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Fortunately, it happened early in the morning, so nobody was around:

At 5:26 am local time on August 10, 2025, a massive wedge of rock with a volume of at least 63.5 million cubic meters detached from a mountain above Alaska's Tracy Arm fjord. The falling rock plummeted into the deep waters at the terminus of the South Sawyer Glacier and caused an initial 100-meter-high breaking wave that tore across the fjord at speeds exceeding 70 meters a second. When this wave hit the opposite shoreline, it surged up the steep rocks to a height of 481 meters above sea level.

"It was the second highest tsunami ever recorded on Earth," says Aram Fathian, a researcher at the University of Calgary and co-author of a recent Science study that reconstructed this event in detail. "But until now, almost nobody heard about it because it was a near-miss event," he adds. There were no injuries or fatalities reported following the Tracy Arm fjord tsunami, mostly because it happened early in the morning. But we might not be so lucky next time.

Earthquake-generated tsunamis usually reach runup heights of a few tens of meters when they strike land. Landslide tsunamis, like the one that happened in Tracy Arm, are often more localized but also way more violent. When millions of tons of rock suddenly fall into a confined body of water like a narrow fjord, the variation in water depth and the direct displacement of the water column produce extremely high waves. Since 1925, scientists have documented 27 such events with runups exceeding 50 meters. The highest was the 1958 Lituya Bay tsunami, which reached 530 meters.

The source of the 2025 Tracy Arm tsunami was a steep rock wedge on the northern side of the fjord. Its headscarp, the uppermost boundary of a landslide or rockfall, sat roughly 1,025 meters above sea level. For centuries, the structural integrity of this slope was maintained by a massive wall of ice known as the South Sawyer Glacier. But South Sawyer, like many other glaciers in the Stikine Icefield, has been in a state of retreat due to the warming climate.

[...] Retrospective analysis of optical and radar satellite imagery from the weeks preceding the slide showed no visible tension cracks or major deformational scarring on the slope. From the outside, it looked perfectly sound. But deep within the rock, surfaces were already grinding. Regional seismometers registered localized repeating earthquakes beginning as early as August 5. By August 9, these mini earthquakes were happening once every hour. In the six hours leading up to the main failure, the gaps between these seismic signals shrank to between 30 to 60 seconds.

The cause of this uptick in microseismicity was the small patches of rock and ice snapping as a huge part of the cliff began to inch its way downward. About an hour before the landslide, the signals merged into a continuous, grinding slip. And then, the rock fell.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

America's aging electric grid is struggling to meet modern demands—especially amid the AI boom. Overhauling it will be no small feat:

Most of America’s power grid infrastructure is 40 to 70 years old. That may not sound ancient, but modern-day pressures are exposing cracks in the system.

Across the nation, aging power systems are crumbling under the strain of the AI boom, extreme weather, and policy paralysis. In several regions, operating reserves are tightening, increasing the risk that supply could fall short during peak conditions when routine outages are factored in. As a result, consumers are grappling with rising utility costs and reduced reliability.

For this Giz Asks, we asked experts what it will take to modernize the U.S. power grid. They pointed to numerous challenges but also outlined clear ways to bring each component of this outdated system up to speed, from generation to distribution.

TFA presents answers from four experts on the challenges with generation, transmission, and distribution, and potential ways forward.

Original Submission

Bloomberg reports on a recent court decision in China.

The court decided that a tech firm in eastern China had illegally fired one of its workers after he refused to take a demotion when his job was automated by AI, according to a statement published by the Hangzhou Intermediate People's Court.

"The termination grounds cited by the company did not fall under negative circumstances such as business downsizing or operational difficulties, nor did they meet the legal condition that made it 'impossible to continue the employment contract,'" the court said in the article dated April 28. Companies cannot unilaterally lay off employees or cut salaries due to technological progress, the court said in a separate statement, citing the same case.

[...]

The employee at the center of the case, a quality assurance professional at a tech company identified only as Zhou, had been responsible for checking the accuracy of outputs by large language models, according to the filing. When an AI system took over his job, he was demoted and forced to take a 40% pay cut.

When Zhou refused the reassignment, the company terminated him, pointing to reductions in staffing due to AI. The case went to arbitration and then the Chinese court system, which supported a compensation package.

The ruling builds on a precedent set by another Chinese court in December, which found that AI implementation did not meet the necessary legal standard for a mapping company to terminate one of its employees' contracts.

Also at https://archive.ph/6tNRC.

If it didn't say China all over it, I would have guessed this court decision was in Europe(??).

Going back to a hypothetical situation from, say, 20 years ago, does anyone know what happened (in China) to a room full of lathe operators when the company bought a CNC lathe and a robot to load and unload the parts? I certainly don't recall reading about any court decisions supporting the machinists back then, perhaps because the Chinese economy was growing so fast that another job was easy to find?

Original Submission

"Fnord666" writes:

Subquadratic has launched a new AI architecture featuring a 12-million-token context window that outperforms GPT-5.5 on retrieval benchmarks:

Every frontier model in 2026 advertises a context window of at least a million tokens, but almost none of them are actually great at making use of all of that information. On MRCR v2, the multi-reference retrieval benchmark labs report, the best model is GPT-5.5, which scores 74.0%. Others like Claude Opus 4.7 at 32.2% are far behind.

At this point, a million tokens seems to be the maximum for the context window that the major frontier labs are offering. One major reason for the million-token max is the same one that has shaped every transformer-based model since 2017: Attention cost scales quadratically with context length, so doubling the input quadruples the work. Essentially, RAG, agentic decomposition, hybrid model architectures, and every other workaround the industry has built are ways of making tradeoffs to get around this.

Subquadratic, a Miami-based startup, launched its first model on Tuesday and claims it can get around all of this, now offering a model that can handle a token window of 12 million tokens. What's more, the company says it plans to offer a model with a 50-million-context window soon.

The company, which has 11 Ph.D. researchers on staff, argues that its architecture, called Subquadratic Selective Attention (SSA), scales linearly in both compute and memory with respect to context length. The company says it runs 52 times faster than dense attention at a million tokens, hits 92.1% on needle-in-a-haystack retrieval at 12 million tokens — a context length no frontier model currently gets close to — and scores 83 on MRCR v2, beating OpenAI by nine points.

[...] The quadratic cost of attention is obviously not a new problem, and SSA is not the first attempt to solve it. The research line goes back nearly to the original transformer paper, and the overall pattern has remained consistent. Every approach has traded one necessary property to gain another, and none have been able to replace dense attention at the frontier scale.

[...] DeepSeek's Native Sparse Attention won the ACL 2025 best paper award, for example. Its successor, DeepSeek Sparse Attention (DSA), is shipping in DeepSeek V3.2-Exp. DSA's lightning indexer routes attention to a small subset of selected keys, and the attention over those keys is genuinely sparse. The indexer that picks them, however, has to score every query against every key, meaning the selection step is itself quadratic.

SubQuadratic CTO Alex Whedon tells The New Stack, "Sparse attention basically means instead of doing what transformers do, which is if you have 1,000 words, you look at every possible relationship between all 1,000 words, which is 1,000 squared combinations. You realize that only a portion of those actually matter and you only process the portion that matter."

hubie writes:

SteamOS scared Microsoft into making Windows less like Windows:

For decades, if you wanted to game, you used Windows. I mean, you could use Linux or macOS, but game support was purely dependent on whether the developer took the time to create a native client for your operating system. And given how people on Linux and macOS were likely not gamers in the first place (given how they were on, you know, Windows), the sales weren't often worth the development time.

But then something clicked. Valve wanted to release a handheld console not too unlike the Switch, but for PC gaming. To do that, they needed an operating system. And while they could have just slapped Windows 11 on it and called it a day, they instead cooked up an operating system based on Arch Linux called SteamOS. And while the tides didn't turn immediately, it has gotten to the point where Microsoft is scared of losing its "best OS for gaming" title.

When Valve created SteamOS, it had the same problem that all Linux distros had. No matter how good SteamOS was, it was still at the mercy of people bothering to create a native app separate from the Windows one that ran on Linux. So, Valve decided to take the onus off the developers and instead create Proton, a compatibility layer.

With Proton, Linux distros could run Windows games without the developers needing to lift a finger. It's not perfect; in fact, there's an entire website called ProtonDB where people test out titles and share any grievances they have getting the game to work on their system. However, the cool thing about Proton being open-source was that people could fix the issues they were encountering and improve gaming for everyone.

The obvious benefit of Proton's advancement is that more Steam titles will run more smoothly on the Steam Deck. However, it also meant that desktop operating systems could run Windows games via Proton. People could tap into their Steam library on a Linux distro, and all was good.

And then Linux started winning.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-may-have-discovered-how-parkinsons-disease-spreads-through-the-brain/

New Yale School of Medicine (YSM) research suggests that two proteins on the surface of brain neurons involved in movement may play a key role in the progression of Parkinson’s disease.

Parkinson’s disease is a neurodegenerative disorder in which neurons gradually deteriorate and die. This cell loss is linked to the buildup of α-synuclein, a protein that becomes misfolded and can spread from one neuron to another.

Scientists still do not fully understand how α-synuclein moves between cells. A new study in Nature Communications points to two membrane proteins, mGluR4 and NPDC1, as important factors that help carry misfolded α-synuclein into healthy neurons after it is released by dying ones.

Senior author Stephen Strittmatter, MD, PhD, Vincent Coates Professor of Neurology and chair of the Department of Neuroscience at YSM, says the discovery could support the development of better Parkinson’s treatments.

Misfolded α-synuclein is “the pathologic hallmark of Parkinson’s disease,” he says. “If we understood how it gets into neurons, we could perhaps block or slow down the progression of the disease,” he adds. But to do that, “we need to understand the molecular mechanism of how it spreads.”

Neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, are becoming an increasing health concern in the United States. The Parkinson’s Foundation estimates that about 1.1 million people in the U.S. are currently living with Parkinson’s disease, with nearly 90,000 new diagnoses each year.

Parkinson’s disease often causes movement-related symptoms, including tremors, balance problems, and slower movement. These symptoms are tied to the accumulation of misfolded α-synuclein in motor-related brain cells. As the protein spreads from neuron to neuron, symptoms become worse.

One possible way α-synuclein enters new cells is by attaching to proteins on the cell surface. To test that possibility, Strittmatter and his colleagues generated 4,400 groups of cells, each designed to express different surface proteins, and examined whether any of them bound to misfolded α-synuclein.

Most of the surface proteins did not bind to it. However, 16 did, including two found in human dopamine neurons in the substantia nigra, the brain region that degenerates in Parkinson’s disease. The researchers found that these two proteins, mGluR4 and NPDC1, carried misfolded α-synuclein into cells.

The results led Strittmatter and his colleagues to suspect that mGluR4 and NPDC1 may help α-synuclein move between neurons. To investigate further, the researchers genetically engineered mice so that either mGluR4 or NPDC1 no longer functioned, then introduced misfolded α-synuclein.