10 December 2011 | NewScientist | 17

TO FIGHT an autoimmune disease, you’ve got to outwit a rogue immune system that has turned on itself. By doing just that, symptoms of multiple sclerosis have been reversed in mice.

MS occurs when the fatty myelin sheath that enwraps nerve fibres to improve their electrical conductivity comes under attack from the immune system. Impaired signal transmission

can cause muscle weakness, vision problems and paralysis.

To switch off the attack, Marco Prinz at the University of Freiburg, Germany, and colleagues, took mice genetically modified to present symptoms of MS and injected them with RNA that stimulates the production of a protein called interferon-b (IFNb).

The mice showed “rapid improvement” with a decrease

‘Supermassive’ barely covers it

TWO huge black holes may be the largest ever measured.

Supermassive black holes inhabit most large galaxies. One, in the galaxy Messier 87, has the mass of about 6 billion suns, but it is no longer the record holder. There is one in galaxy NGC 3842 with the mass of about 10 billion suns, and NGC 4889’s could weigh up to 37 billion suns, say Nicholas McConnell at the University of California, Berkeley, and colleagues.

The estimates were made by clocking the motion of stars near these galaxies’ cores, since a black hole’s mass dictates how fast objects orbit around them (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature10636).

The mass of galaxies tends to correlate with that of their central black holes, but both of these holes are heavier than predicted. Collisions with other galaxies could have force-fed the holes with gas, the team speculates.

Leaning left leads to a reduced outlook on life

IF SOMETHING has gone down in your estimation, check your stance. Leaning to the left encourages people to underestimate everything from the height of buildings to the number of Michael Jackson chart-toppers.

To find out whether body positions influence value estimation, Anita Eerland and her colleagues at Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands asked 33 people to guess the numerical answer to questions while stood on a Wii-console balance board. A third of the questions were asked while the volunteers were perfectly upright. The rest of the questions were asked when –

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Body tricked to fight multiple sclerosis in tail weakness and paralysis over the following 48 hours. Increased IFNb appeared to slow the development of T-cells – immune cells that may play a key role in MS (Nature Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1038/nn.2964).

Around 80 per cent of people with MS treated with injections of IFNb develop antibodies which reduce the efficacy of the protein. Getting the body to generate its own IFNb neatly dodges the antibody problem.

unbeknownst to the volunteers – the board was altered so that it would give a “perfectly balanced” readout only if volunteers tilted slightly to either the left or right.

As none of the participants got any of the questions exactly right, all answers were treated as estimates. When Eerland’s team compared the answers given by participants they found that, on average, people made smaller estimates when they were tilted to the left (Psychological Science, DOI: 10.1177/0956797611420731).

The finding appears to tally with mental number line theory, which supposes that people who read from left to right mentally represent smaller numbers on the left.

Martin Fischer at Potsdam University, Germany, says he would expect a different effect among people from cultures that count from right to left.

A SPECTACULAR light show on Christmas day 2010 may have been the first detection of a comet crashing into a neutron star.

NASA’s Swift satellite caught a burst of gamma rays at 1837 GMT. Curiously, it lasted for half an hour, much longer than normal gamma-ray bursts, which are thought to herald the birth of black holes or neutron stars.

Sergio Campana of the Brera Astronomical Observatory in Merate, Italy, and colleagues say a comet may have been shredded after wandering into the intense gravitational field of a neutron star. Fragments of the comet would have unleashed a stream of gamma rays as they showered onto the star’s surface (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature10592).

Comet creates new ‘star of Bethlehem’

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