Scienceline
Glowing green and swimming off the corner of the picture, the eel looked unnatural, as if it had been Photoshopped with DayGlo colors. David Gruber says, “that darn eel" led to a 300-mile eel-catching expedition from Little Cayman to the sandy beaches of Lee Stocking Island in the Bahamas.
Gruber teaches biology and environmental science at Baruch College in Manhattan, but his passion is scuba diving with dinoflagellates, single-celled bioluminescent organisms. His group’s glowing photographs of underwater Caribbean creatures -- sea anemones, coral, and fishes -- illuminate the new Creatures of Light exhibit, a show at the American Museum of Natural History themed around all things bioluminescent (producing their own light) or biofluorescent (absorbing light and reemitting it as a different color).
Vibrant photos of the coral wall give visitors a virtual night dive experience even if they’ve never donned a wetsuit. “When you swim in the water at night, it’s like a disco party,” Gruber says.
Instead of teaching this past semester, Gruber worked on the exhibit, with the help of a National Science Foundation grant. In addition to the glowing photo wall of Little Cayman’s reefs, he worked with museum artists and scientists to perfect the magnified dinoflagellate and jellyfish models. Gruber, who trained as a journalist and has a reporter’s passion for accuracy, even brought in a spectrometer to ensure the light in the exhibit matched nature’s luminescent wavelengths.
Live flashlight fish, filled with bioluminescent bacteria, contribute to the exhibit as well, blinking what looks like a secret code to passers-by. “They’re so stressed out right now,” Gruber says, looking concerned as he leans closer to their tank. “It’s a really energetic process to glow.”
It takes energy to pursue glowing coral and fish, too -- and to discover new eels. When Gruber saw his colleague Jim Hellemn’s photo of the green serpent, he thought Hellman was playing a practical joke. Skepticism turned to enthusiasm when the researchers realized the eel was a previously unknown fish living in a biofluorescent reef. “From that point we wanted to get this eel,” Gruber says.
His diving group flew to the Bahamas, zipped on their wetsuits, and spent hours catching and cataloging fish. They gave most of the specimens to the museum, but Gruber kept the eel, storing it in a freezer at his Gramercy lab. He is purifying its fluorescent proteins and hopes they can someday be used as luminescent tags in biomedical research.
At 39, Gruber is a real up and coming guy, says Vincent Pieribone, a neurobiologist at Yale University School of Medicine. “He’s a practicing scientist, but he’s got a knack for the communicating aspect, which is rare in our field.”
Pieribone would know. They spent two years writing a book about biofluorescence and bioluminescence called “Aglow in the Dark,” shortly before the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to three scientists who advanced fluorescent protein research.
Gruber and Pieribone, who met through Pieribone’s girlfriend, now wife, once spent an entire month together in Australia collecting fluorescent creatures in 2002. “We’ve been having a bromance for years,” Pieribone says.
Gruber’s love of the water began as a child in New Jersey. During family vacations, he learned how to boogie board in the waters of Malibu, California. At the University of Rhode Island, he surfed with friends before morning oceanography classes.
He found his calling in Belize, studying reef fish during his junior year. He spent hours every day catching fish, suturing glow sticks to their bodies and tracking their movements in the reef at night.
“You start to see there’s a community down there,” he says. “You come across the same fish every day and you know which rock he’s under. You know where the eel is, where the octopus is.”
Following graduation, Gruber worked as a bicycle messenger in Washington, D.C. until he landed an internship with the Smithsonian Institution and flew to Guyana in South America to research forest diversity. Most days, he climbed trees and fended off mosquitoes.
But trees aren’t underwater, so he left the Smithsonian for Duke University, where he studied climate change’s effects on the oceans, a factor in the death of coral colonies. Then he worked for the South Florida Water Management District, measuring the water quality and sea grass in Florida Bay. The project was constantly in the press. Inspired by investigative reporter and novelist Carl Hiaasen’s stories about swamp destruction, Gruber offered to share a firsthand account about the restoration effort.
But “nobody would publish my work because they said I wasn’t a journalist,” he says. “So I applied to journalism school.” One of his journalism professors at Columbia, Sig Gissler, remembers Gruber as earnest, engaging and energetic. “We called him a man of science with a soul of a reporter because while he didn’t have a lot of experience -- he was total rookie -- he made up for it with tenacity.”
The tug of the water pulled him back to research, and Gruber powered through the next six years, earning his doctorate in biological oceanography at Rutgers University. Few scientists knew the complete history of fluorescent protein research, so he and Pieribone wrote a book about how the bioluminescent jellyfish changed the face of modern biological science. “It was just a really nice narrative,” Gruber says, “but it was a difficult narrative because your main character is a protein.”
Undeterred, they traveled across the U.S., Australia, and Russia to interview the researchers whose work led to the famous green fluorescent protein that would win the Nobel. Some sources were reserved so Pieribone, a neurobiologist, let Gruber take the lead. “He was more subtle,” Pieribone says. “He was more of a journalist. I have a huge respect for those skills.”
The duo published their book with Harvard University Press in 2005 as Gruber moved to Brown University for post-doctoral study on ways to use fluorescent proteins as biological sensors. Researchers can introduce these glowing proteins into cells to track all kinds of activity, including the growth of tumors or chatter between nerve cells.
“Very little is known about how widespread of a phenomenon biofluorescence is in nature, even though it has proven to be valuable as a tool for biologists and medical scientists,” says Dan Tchernov, head of marine biology at the University of Haifa. He has co-authored several papers with Gruber, and noted that because researchers lack a remote operated vehicle to study deep reefs, Gruber is building one. “Dave is well regarded and a very promising researcher who can successfully bridge sciences,” he says.
Now at Baruch, Gruber chases an ever-expanding array of projects on the side. “I love studying all life forms and their beautiful interconnections,” he says. Recent projects include a 2010 study about correlations between autism and cancer and a current project on the epigenetics of diabetes. All the while, he’s been collecting fluorescent proteins and co-producing an IMAX film about bioluminescence. He, Pieribone, and colleagues have published a cascade of studies about fluorescent proteins, including a 2010 paper describing the world’s brightest -- a glowing green protein from a warm water coral.
Pieribone praises his friend’s creativity, but says it impedes Gruber’s career. “He doesn’t stress the things in an academic career that will make him a full professor at Harvard,” Pieribone says. “You have to be really focused and Dave just doesn’t want to focus that heavily on one thing.”
“He’s like the indie film director,” Pieribone says. “He’s not the one who sells a lot of movie tickets, he’s not the Michael Bay, but he makes the better movie.”
This article originally appeared at Scienceline, a project of New York University's Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program.
At 1:30 in the afternoon in New York City’s East Village, First Avenue becomes a blacktopped river banked by the bright yellow bodies of taxicabs. The cabs line up bumper-to-bumper: wide-hipped Crown Victorias, snub-nosed Priuses, and boxy Escapes. Their owners filter out onto the sidewalks and head north toward the Medina Masjid mosque on 11th Street for the 2:00 p.m. prayer call. By 3:00, the curbs are empty; the cabs have filtered back into the streams of cars flowing through the Manhattan grid.
On a chilly spring afternoon, cabbie Mazuman Subhani, a towering man with a downy black beard and a cream-colored Morrocan cap, pulls his traditional Crown Victoria out of traffic and into this scene. He parks between 10th and 11th Streets to prepare to pray. He likes his cab, but he has friends who save a lot of money on gas by driving hybrid cab models. “It costs $37 to $38 to drive this car 100 miles,” Subhani says, motioning to his Crown Vic on the First Avenue curb. “For a new hybrid model, it costs $10 to $12.”
Had Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s wishes been granted, every cab parked on First Avenue -- or motoring anywhere in New York City -- would be a hybrid. In 2007, Bloomberg mandated that his city’s entire taxicab fleet be hybrids by 2012. But any New Yorker can glance down an avenue and see that Bloomberg’s mandate fell through. While almost half of the 13,000-vehicle taxi fleet is currently hybrids, half isn’t. Moreover, within a few years there will be far fewer hybrid cabs than there are now.
Bloomberg’s failure to create an all-hybrid taxi fleet was triggered by opposition from lobbyists representing taxi drivers and fleet owners. These lobbyists successfully sued the city over the mandate because they did not want to be forced to buy cars they considered less sturdy and safe than the time-tested Ford Crown Victoria. While many cabbies and fleet owners have bought high-mileage cars anyway, next year the choice of taxicab models on the market will get a lot narrower. Most cab owners will be forced to buy the city’s newly chosen official taxicab -- and it’s not a hybrid.
Back in 2007 when Bloomberg proposed his hybrid taxicab mandate, he was trying to reach a larger goal. His overarching environmental plan for the city, PlaNYC, calls for a more than 30 percent reduction of greenhouse gas emissions between 2005 and 2030. Since on-road vehicles are responsible for around 20 percent of the city’s carbon emissions, Bloomberg declared that all new taxicabs hitting the streets in 2008 get at least 25 miles per gallon and get 30 miles per gallon each year after that. As the lifespan of a New York City taxicab is only five years, his plan meant that the whole fleet would have been converted to high fuel efficiency vehicles by 2012, saving city air from carbon emissions equivalent to burning enough coal to fill 1,000 train cars.
Bloomberg’s plan drew some critics, however. The Metropolitan Taxicab Board of Trade, a politically powerful collective of taxicab owners, argued that hybrid vehicles -- the only vehicles that got 25 to 30 miles per gallon in 2007 -- did not satisfy the safety and durability standards set by New York’s Taxi and Limousine Commission for all cars that operate as taxicabs, says MTBOT lobbyist Michael Woloz.
“They were just hybrid passenger cars that some owners were painting yellow, outfitting with a partition and a roof light and calling taxicabs,” says Woloz. Only Ford Crown Victorias truly meet TLC standards because they’re built specifically for use as taxicabs. He says the city cannot require cabbies to drive any particular car if that car isn’t as durable on the streets as the Crown Victoria.
On that basis, the MTBOT and a few other taxicab organizations sued the city in 2008, calling Bloomberg’s mandate illegal. The judge on the case sided with the taxicab organizations and cancelled Bloomberg’s mandate in 2009, but not because hybrid cars don’t meet operational standards for taxicabs. Instead, the judge found Bloomberg lacked the authority to create emissions laws.
The Clean Air Act states that only the federal government can impose laws regarding fuel efficiency and mileage, says Allan Fromberg, a spokesperson for the TLC. “In other words,” Fromberg says, “the clean air laws don’t allow us to clean the air.”
Despite this legal setback, the number of hybrid taxicabs in New York City continued to steadily grow, says Fromberg. Of the more than 13,000 taxicabs now on the road, nearly 6,000 of them are hybrids. This means the percentage of hybrid taxicabs being driven has risen from less than 20 percent to more than 40 percent in the past five years.
“Regardless of the lack of a mandate,” Fromberg says, “people realize that it is a very wise decision to buy a hybrid and have been voluntarily purchasing them.” There are currently around 16 car models that have been authorized by the commission to serve as taxicabs, including hybrids such as the Toyota Camry Hybrid, the Ford Escape Hybrid, and the Toyota Prius.
A taxicab with a day driver and a night driver cruises the streets of New York City for at least 20 hours a day. That’s a lot of road time, which is why cabs can easily rack up around 1,300 miles a week. By driving a hybrid Toyota Prius, a cabbie could burn 50 gallons less fuel each week than if he or she drove a standard taxicab like Ford’s Crown Victoria, saving $20 to $25 a day on gas.
Saving money by driving a hybrid might be a straightforward choice for drivers who own their own cabs, but many cabbies lease their cabs from fleet owners. Muzaman Subhani is one of these cabbies, and he drives whatever the fleet owner gives him -- a Crown Victoria, in his case. According to Fromberg, fleet owners often buy Crown Victorias en masse, because the parts can easily be traded from car to car. If one car’s body is junked, for example, a fleet owner can take its functional brake pads and transfer them to a car with bad brakes.
Because of the gas money saved by hybrid drivers, though, it might seem reasonable to imagine that even fleet owners could be swayed to invest heavily in hybrid models over the next few years. Perhaps the percentage of hybrid cabs in New York City could keep growing until every cab lining First Avenue in the early afternoon or whipping through city streets is a hybrid. But this will almost certainly not be the case, because the NV200s are coming.
Beginning in October of 2013, an army of square-shouldered vans will replace the plethora of taxicab models that now reign on the roads. Over five years, the city will require all of its taxicab drivers without special wheelchair or hybrid taxi licenses (there are currently only around 300 hybrid licenses) to replace their old vehicles with a single model.
The model the city has chosen and dubbed the “Taxi of Tomorrow” is the Nissan NV200. While the Nissan should get around 25 miles per gallon (a major improvement when compared to the Crown Vic’s 14 miles per gallon), it’s no hybrid, which can get twice as many miles per gallon than the Nissan.
Though it seems like tomorrow’s taxi should be a more environmentally friendly car, hybrids weren’t even among the cars suggested as potential models for the new official cab, according to Johanna Dyer. Dyer is a lawyer with the National Resources Defense Council (which publishes OnEarth) who specializes in New York’s environmental initiatives. She says the city could not consider a hybrid model as the Taxi of Tomorrow because of the same law that cancelled Bloomberg’s 2007 mandate -- city governments can’t require anyone to buy a high fuel efficiency vehicle.
Nissan is planning to test six electric NV200s in the upcoming years, but Dyer says that as far as she’s aware the contract between NYC and Nissan doesn’t require Nissan to develop a significant number of durable electric cabs. “If Nissan and the city don’t work together to ensure a path to cleaner-running vehicles,” says Dyer, “then this Taxi of Tomorrow could be a missed opportunity for New York to set an example of sustainability for other cities.”
Like the Crown Vic, the traditionally fueled NV200 will be built specially for taxicab use and should meet the safety and durability standards that the taxicab organizations require.
The MTBOT is not easily pleased, though. Woloz says the organization supports the idea of creating a “super taxi” but isn’t sure the idea has been realized in the NV200. He says the only way to know if a car will be a good taxi is to put it on the streets and see how it holds up. “Time will tell as to whether the end product meets the expectations that we all have,” says Woloz.
He says that not many cars can withstand the abuse a taxicab suffers -- passengers kicking seats, slamming doors, and banging into partitions for over 20 hours a day. That’s why the MTBOT is suspicious of cars, like the Toyota Prius, that are merely painted yellow and put on the street as a cab.
Subhani is less critical of the cabs he and his friends drive. Last month he went to the trade commission's headquarters in Manhattan to preview the NV200. “Inside is beautiful,” he says. There’s no rise in the floor at the center console in back, so if he has three passengers, the middle person doesn’t have her knees bumping into her chin. The floor is also rubber like the floor of a bus -- very durable and easy to clean.
“Everybody’s excited,” says Subhani. For him, as for those supporting the Taxicab of the Future, it seems the utility of the cab trumps the fuel efficiency.
This article originally appeared at Scienceline, a project of New York University's Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program.
Image: Challenge Bibendum
A new generation of psychologists and therapists focus on the relationship between nature and mental health
White Mountains, in Maine. Image: copepod/flickr CC-A/SA2.0
Standing alone atop a modest mountain in rural Maine, Eric Adams looked out into the darkness all around him. Between the silhouettes of boulders and trees, slivers of yellow light wandered and winked--the eyes of wild animals. Fears began to crowd his mind, but he did not push them away. This was part of his therapy.
To help confront a marriage in crisis, Adams (a pseudonym) sought counseling. But the 34-year-old lawyer from Syracuse, New York, didn't opt for the psychiatrist's couch. Instead, he chose the mountain. Adams turned to an emerging practice called ecotherapy, which applies the principles of ecopsychology--the study of how the natural world influences mental health.
"I don't have an office--all my meetings are outside regardless of the weather," said Dennis Grannis-Phoenix, an ecotherapist in Bangor, Maine who began counseling Adams in 2004. Hiking, camping, kayaking--each therapeutic session centered on an outdoor activity. Grannis-Phoenix asked Adams to climb the mountain alone as an exercise in learning to face his fears and anxieties. Instead of rationalizing his fears, Grannis-Phoenix wanted Adams to embrace them--something both therapist and patient feel is easier to learn in nature than in an office.
"Nature forces you to confront your immediate circumstances," said Adams. "Ecotherapy speaks to you not just through your analytical and verbal capabilities--your body interacts with nature." In a way, Adams said, interacting with nature is a kind of therapy for both body and mind.
He isn't alone in thinking so. In the early 1990s, when historian Theodore Roszak criticized mainstream psychology for failing to consider the relationship between mental health and natural environments, a movement called ecopsychology emerged to address exactly that. Loyal to Roszack at first, the movement developed ideas that budded in the 1960s and framed itself as a critique of Western psychology's focus on the experiment--but things are beginning to change. Some researchers are mounting a new campaign to bring the scientific method to ecopsychology and its applied practice, ecotherapy. These researchers have already founded the field's first peer-reviewed journal, Ecopsychology, and they are about to publish a book outlining their mission. The book, published by MIT Press, advocates serious study of how green spaces color psychological well-being.
"We are hoping to revitalize the field of ecopsychology," said Jolina Ruckert, a PhD candidate in developmental psychology at the University of Washington and one of the authors of the forthcoming book. "We want to bring in the more rigorous approach of the modern social sciences."
Science and Skepticism
In the past few years, some ecopsychologists have made significant strides in adding scientific rigor to their field. What their research suggests so far is that even subtle interactions with nature provide a range of cognitive benefits, including elevated mood, enhanced memory, and decreased stress. Staring out a window at pretty scenery can significantly lower one's heart rate, for example, and some studies even indicate that hospital windows with views of nature can facilitate healing. What's more, nature provides measurably greater benefits than both manmade environments and simulations of nature. Research demonstrates that walking through the city can tax our attention, whereas a park restores our concentration and can even improve our performance on tests of memory.
These findings come from controlled studies that follow the tenets of mainstream psychology. Despite the new enthusiasm for serious empirical work, many researchers in mainstream psychology remain cautious about drawing any conclusions that ecopsychological studies cannot properly support. "My impression as an outsider is that ecopsychology is a promising but preliminary field," said Scott O. Lilienfeld, a psychologist at Emory University. "I wouldn't say it's conclusive, but there are certainly many suggestions that nature may be helpful for short-term mental health. There's no question it can have positive effects on mood. I think claims that nature may be helpful are reasonable, but claims that our technological society or distance from nature are massively detrimental to mental health go beyond the current data."
The fact is that empirical work is a new trend in ecopsychology, which began as a field that wasn't interested in the experiment so much as the experience--an individual's personal experience with a natural environment.
"In the beginning, we didn't need to measure anything," said Lisa Lynch, an ecopsychology pioneer who now coordinates a masters program in the field at Antioch University in Seattle, Washington. The University of Wisconsin, Oberlin College, and Lewis & Clark College also offer graduate programs in ecopsychology.
Lynch's graduate work at Antioch is emblematic of ecopsychology's subjective origins. Like many of her emerging colleagues, Lynch drew inspiration from Roszak's 1992 The Voice of the Earth to examine how natural spaces--as distinct from urban or manmade environments--affect mental health. But her PhD thesis included no scientific research.
Instead, Lynch designed a creative thesis on the ecology and natural history of a river in Oregon where she grew up--a river in which her 11-year-old sister drowned.
"The ecopsychological element for me was to take my own story of loss and grief and look at its relationship to all these other stories--the salmon, the natives that lived on the river," Lynch said. "It was 1994 and it this was one of the earliest ecotherapy projects." She wrote a novel; she choreographed a ceremonial dance; she told her stories. But there were no controlled experiments--just experiences and anecdotes.
"My experiences are not empirical science, but for me they are extremely valid," Lynch said. A new generation of ecopsychologists disagrees. Experience, they argue, is not enough.
"Ecopsychology just didn't have the rigor needed to really understand the relationship between the natural world and mental health," said the University of Washington's Ruckert. She belongs to a new generation of ecopsychologists who are trying to establish that rigor by growing a body of empirical work.
Parks and Relaxation
According to Thomas Doherty, a clinical psychologist in Portland, Oregon and the editor of Ecopsychology, research by these second generation ecopsychologists evidences the measurable benefits of nature for both body and mind. In green spaces, for example, people's heart rates decrease, their muscles relax, and they become calmer. It's the difference you feel when you leave behind a busy city street for a peaceful park.
A recent study by Ruckert's advisor Peter Kahn confirmed these findings. First, Kahn stressed out his participants by giving them a series of math tests. Then he placed some people in front of a window overlooking a grassy lawn with trees, others in front of a large plasma television screen displaying the lawn in real time, and still others in front of a blank wall. As expected, those in front of the window experienced the quickest drop in stress levels, as measured by their decreasing heart rate. Participants also spent far more time looking out the window and at the plasma screen than at the blank wall. But the researchers found an unexpected result.
"Surprisingly, the blank wall and the plasma screen were no different in terms of stress reduction," said Ruckert. Their study indicates that gazing at an authentic natural space reduces stress, whereas a digital replica of nature soothes only as well as a boring blank wall.
Kahn, whose study appeared in the May 2008 issue of the Journal of Environmental Psychology, isn't sure why the plasma screen failed to relieve stress any better than a blank wall--but he suspects it's because people recognize even a realistic display of nature as a substitute for the real thing.
Emory's Lilienfeld thinks Kahn's study is a good example of how to design empirical ecopsychological studies, but says he won't be convinced until future studies confirm the findings. "There's a lot of interesting and provocative work, but studies need to have proper controls and some of them are starting to, I think," Lilienfeld said. "The plasma screen study is a good example, but it's still only one study. I think it's a good design, but I want to see the results replicated. I want to see there is that isn't just a general effect of relaxation, but really is specific to nature."
Focus Among the Flowers
In addition to helping us relax, authentic interactions with nature help maintain concentration, according to attention restoration theory. "Our energy to focus gets fatigued," Doherty explained. "Natural spaces restore our ability to pay attention."
In a 2008 study at the University of Michigan, Marc Berman asked some participants to memorize digits and recite them in reverse order. Then he had one group of participants walk through an arboretum, while others traveled crowded city streets. Afterwards, the subjects completed the digit task again. Those who'd strolled through the arboretum performed with higher attention and memory than those who had walked in the city. The arboretum-walkers recited an average of 1.5 digits more on their second test than on their first, compared with an average of 0.5 digits improvement for participants who had been exposed to the urban environment.
"Our study was one of the first to make it into a mainstream psychology journal," said Berman, whose study was published in Psychological Science. "We had a lot of experimental control." For example, Berman made sure his participants followed consistent paths through the arboretum and streets by monitoring their progress with GPS-enabled wristwatches. And he used standardized surveys to assess people's mood before and after their walks.
"It was one of the first times that we grounded the human relationship with nature in empirical research," said Ruckert of Berman's study. "As ecopsychology increasingly incorporates a more systematic approach, I see it emerging more in the dialogue of mainstream psychology."
Even Lisa Lynch--the ecopsychology pioneer who believes in the experience over the experiment--is excited by her field's new empirical directions. "Sometimes it was a little like Peter Kahn and I were fighting with light sabers," Lynch said. "But I think Kahn and his students are doing some excellent work looking at how can we validate these experiences through science. I think that's an important move for the field."
Ecopsychology had no peer-reviewed journal of its own until April 2009, when Mary Anne Liebert, Inc. published the first issue of Ecopsychology. Additionally, Ruckert, Peter Kahn and Patricia Habash are the co-editors of an upcoming book with MIT Press entitled Ecopsychology: Science, Totems and the Technological Species, in which around a dozen psychologists, anthropologists and biologists discuss their work and the importance of applying rigorous scientific methods to ecopsychology.
But some ecopsychologists and ecotherapists aren't so enthusiastic about the new empirical work. "For me the science is not a critical piece," said Dennis Grannis-Phoenix, the Maine ecotherapist who asked Eric Adams to hike a mountain alone at night. "I've seen the changes Eric and my patients go through and they are real."
Adams, on the other hand--who is now divorced, but lives in Bolivia to be near his children--welcomes science. "People who gravitate towards ecopsychology don't tend to have that kind of a background," Adams said. "But it's not like the scientific perspective and the ecotherapeutic perspective are at odds with each other."
For Adams, divorce was the right decision--one he reached through ecotherapy. "Rather than conform to my environment, I learned to change my conditions," Adams said. "Because nature is so much a part of who I am, something about interacting with it helps me to make these big life choices."
This article is provided by Scienceline, a project of New York University's Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program.
