Plaques and tangles pockmark the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease. The extracellular protein amyloid-β makes plaques, and the intracellular protein tau makes tangles, but how exactly these might kill neurons is unclear. Work presented at the annual meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology in San Francisco, California, this week starts to connect some of these dots. George Bloom, of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, and his colleagues began by following up on work that neurons exposed to amyloid-β die not from direct poisoning, but because amyl...