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16 | NewScientist | 8 June 2013 PUTTING digital faces to the abusive voices in their head could help people with schizophrenia. Sixteen people with the condition created an on-screen avatar that best matched what they imagined the voice in their head to look like. They then chose a voice to go with the avatar. Julian Leff at University College London, who led the trial, then took sessions with each person. Leff sat in a separate room and took on a dual role both as therapist and as each person’s avatar. When speaking as the avatar, software altered his voice to match the chosen avatar voice. As the avatar, Leff would start by role-playing an abusive character. Over six sessions, he gradually made the avatar’s responses more supportive. He used his therapist voice to encourage the people to Is flu salvation right under our nose? A BETTER defence against pandemic flu may be on the way. It takes months to make a flu vaccine but, as each vaccine works against only one particular flu virus, we can’t stockpile any. In 2011, researchers looking for a universal vaccine found an antibody that attacks all flu viruses. Normally flu tricks us into making too little of the antibody to make a difference, but James Wilson at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, and his team have created a workaround. They put the DNA that codes for the antibody into an innocuous virus and squirted it into the noses of mice and ferrets. There it made the antibody, which protected the animals against flu viruses including the lethal H5N1 bird flu (Science Translational Medicine, doi.org/mpp). Such a stockpiled remedy could buy time in a pandemic while a vaccine is made, the team say. When the heat is on, starfish lose an arm to survive YOU can tell when a starfish is too hot – it loses an arm. The remarkable behaviour is part of a strategy that may allow the animals to survive in warmer waters. Sylvain Pincebourde at the Institute of Research on Insect Biology in Tours, France, and his colleagues collected 70 ochre starfish (Pisaster ochraceus) from the coast of California and housed them at temperatures ranging between 26 °C and 42 °C. By monitoring body temperature, they found that each animal’s central disc was always 3 °C to 5 °C cooler than its five arms. If its core temperature rose above 35 °C, the starfish BRANDON D. COLE/CORBIS IN BRIEF Standing up to the voices in your head be more forceful and stand up for themselves. Three months later, 15 of the participants showed significant improvement in their symptoms, and three of them had stopped hearing voices altogether. “I found it good to visualise what was going on in my head,” says one of the 16 participants. “I learned how to handle the voices.” Leff discussed the study last week at the Wellcome Trust in London. died. Its arms, however, could withstand those temperatures – although if they remained at 35 °C for more than a few days, one or more arms typically fell off (Journal of Experimental Biology, doi.org/mpr). Temperature regulation is a trait not normally associated with cold-blooded animals and it is not clear how the starfish influence the temperature in the different parts of their bodies. It is possible that they actively divert heat into their arms, which can release the heat into the water relatively efficiently because of their large surface area. This could explain why animals that are warm for an extended period lose some arms: by using them as heat sinks, the starfish may thermally damage their arms beyond repair in a bid to preserve their vital organs. OBESE black holes, not stars, may have lit up the first galaxies – and could have grown into the earliest supermassive black holes. Black holes usually form from a collapsed star, and then grow by gobbling up material. But how did supermassive ones arise a mere billion years after the big bang? Perhaps they were born “obese”, forming when vast clouds of atomic hydrogen collapsed. Now Bhaskar Agarwal at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany, and colleagues say we could detect the result: galaxies with few stars, each dominated by a black hole that shone as matter accreting around it was compressed (Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, doi.org/mqg). Early galaxies were lit by fat black holes
