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Green Ventures: Rewarding Recyclers, and Finding Gold in the Garbage
By BONNIE DeSIMONE, The New York Times, February 21, 2006
PHILADELPHIA — Patrick Fitzgerald found himself distracted as he studied for the bar exam at Fordham University five years ago. New York City was debating the merits of continuing its recycling program and Mr. FitzGerald wondered why that was a question at all. "I wasn't an overt tree-hugger, but I thought it was odd," he said.
He began poking around Web sites and news articles about the economics of recycling, and concluded that one of the industry's biggest problems was motivating its suppliers — the people who generate garbage.
Moral obligation — or even compassion for trees — was not enough to induce good recycling habits, Mr. FitzGerald decided. Instead of spending money on campaigns to persuade people to recycle, he thought: What if you paid them directly? What would happen?
In late 2002, he talked about the idea with Ron Gonen, a high school classmate and fellow Philadelphia-area native. Before long, the project swallowed up their lives and maxed out their credit cards.
Mr. FitzGerald quit his job at a Wall Street law firm, moved back into his mother's attic in suburban Philadelphia and began working the phones and Internet search engines, making contacts in the solid-waste industry and finding retailers who were willing to participate in a customer rewards program. Mr. Gonen, then in his first year in the M.B.A. program at Columbia University, put in late nights writing a business plan and software, becoming "more and more involved and obsessed."
Their teamwork led to the birth of RecycleBank (recyclebank.com) in early 2004. The logo is a piggy bank whose hind end is a recycling bin, embodying consumer incentives and environmental consciousness.
The process seems elegantly simple. Households get credit for the weight of materials they recycle, which is scanned and recorded through a computer chip embedded in the garbage bins when they are picked up by the sanitation crew. They exchange that credit for coupons at various businesses. Municipal officials save disposal fees. Recycling companies make more money from processing. Retailers gain the feel-good association with a socially beneficial activity.
RecycleBank charges municipalities (or private haulers, depending on the arrangement) $24 a household, and guarantees clients that they will save at least that much in disposal fees as waste is diverted from landfills and incinerators. The company also receives revenue from recycling plants, depending on how much it increases the amount of materials that are processed.
"I thought the idea had tremendous merit right from the start," said Clifford J. Schorer Jr., who helped mentor Mr. Gonen in his position as entrepreneur in residence at the Eugene M. Lang Center for Entrepreneurship at Columbia. The university contributed $100,000 to RecycleBank's seed money.
Residents participating in RecycleBank can check their "balance" online and cash in their coupons — a maximum of $25 a month, $400 a year — at several dozen national chains like Starbucks, Home Depot and Bed Bath & Beyond. The Coca-Cola Company set up a Green Community Fund, where coupons can be donated to environmental education programs in the Philadelphia public schools and public libraries.
During its start last year in Philadelphia, RecycleBank also established relationships with local businesses like the Chestnut Hill Cheese Shop and the Reading Terminal Market, where about 25 specialty vendors accept the coupons.
One problem for the RecycleBank was trying to find a way to measure the volume of recyclable goods generated by a household and credit that amount to participants. Through Web searches and phone calls, the men identified Cascade Engineering in Grand Rapids, Mich., which provided free several thousand 35- and 64-gallon bins embedded with RFID (radio frequency identification) technology as part of its research and development budget.
The "smart waste" tag, a combination computer chip and bar code, enables the bins to be scanned and weighed and the amount linked to a household. The information is channeled from an on-board computer in the garbage trucks into a databank.
The LTS Scale Corporation of Twinsburg, Ohio, was able to configure scales and a tipping mechanism for the containers, which fit on the back of the trucks so the bins can be weighed and easily emptied.
Why not cheat by adding a bowling ball or other heavy nonrecyclable items to the trash? RecycleBank came up with a button on the on-board computer that workers can press to flag the address if they notice contraband. This happens "less than rarely," Mr. FitzGerald said.
Both men, who are 30 years old, decided early on that it was important to spare households the tedium of separating glass, paper, plastic and metal. They signed on with the Philadelphia-based Blue Mountain Recycling, which uses sorting technology employing fans, gravity, magnets and manual picking.
RecycleBank persuaded Philadelphia officials to allow it to conduct a pilot project involving 2,500 households in two Philadelphia neighborhoods, upscale Chestnut Hill and modest West Oak Lane. Six months later, 90 percent of the households in both neighborhoods were participating, up from 35 percent in Chestnut Hill and 7 percent in West Oak Lane — averaging 25 pounds a week of recyclables per home. The city is considering whether to contract for the service and extend it.
The project's success has helped Mr. FitzGerald and Mr. Gonen to sell the RecycleBank program to several municipalities in the mid-Atlantic and New England regions. Officials in Wilmington, Del., will begin a RecycleBank plan with an initial 4,000 households on April 1.
The company's largest expansion occurred when Blue Mountain was acquired by Casella Waste Systems in Rutland, Vt., in September. Casella plans to introduce the RecycleBank program to 100,000 households in New England next year.
Mr. Gonen said the fast start had been exhilarating, but added, "I'm very focused on putting on the brakes when they need to be put on."
Palm Trees and Lake Fish Dispel Doubts About a Theory of Evolution
By CARL ZIMMER, The New York Times, ebruary 21, 2006
Sooner or later, everyone encounters a kentia palm. Its ability to grow in low sunlight has made it one of the world's most traded houseplants.
"If you've been to a wine bar or to Starbucks, there may have been one in there," said William Baker, a botanist at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, England.
"Whether you realize it or not, you're familiar with this palm," he said.
As ordinary as this houseplant may be, however, Dr. Baker and colleagues have found that it has an extraordinary story to tell about evolution.
The kentia palm (Howea forsteriana) is found in the wild only on a single remote island in the South Pacific. Based on a recent study, Dr. Baker and his colleagues have concluded that roughly two million years ago, an ancestral species of palm tree living on the island split in two, and one became the kentia palm.
The idea that members of a species living side by side can split into two species is controversial. Some scientists have presented evidence that the process has produced several species of plants and animals, but their ideas have met with intense skepticism.
Two new studies in the journal Nature — one on the kentia palm and a second on fish in a Nicaraguan lake — are impressing some leading skeptics, however.
One reason for the skepticism is that another way for forming new species is well supported by evidence. When a population becomes isolated by a geographical barrier, it can evolve into a new species.
Birds swept to a remote island, for example, may reproduce only among themselves and not with the rest of their species back on the mainland.
Over generations, the birds can acquire a unique set of mutations. They may evolve to be so different from the mainland birds that the two populations can no longer interbreed. They may sing different courtship songs, for example. They may be able to mate, but their hybrids may prove to be sterile. Based on a vast amount of research, scientists agree that this process — called allopatric speciation — drove the evolution of many species.
But some scientists have suggested that some species evolved without geographical barriers and that a new species could emerge from an old one even when all its members were living side by side. The key was for some individuals to begin to mate with one another and not with the rest of the species. If this tendency could be inherited, then two genetically distinct populations could emerge. Ultimately, they would become two separate species.
Mathematical models have suggested this process — known as sympatric speciation — can happen under certain conditions. And scientists have discovered a handful of cases in which, they argue, sympatric speciation took place. Fruit flies from a species that originally lived on hawthorns in the United States, for example, have shifted to apples in the past 150 years. Their DNA suggests that they are diverging from the hawthorn population.
But sympatric speciation has drawn fierce criticism. Skeptics have argued that many cases of sympatric speciation could just as easily have been produced by allopatric speciation. Two species sharing an island may well have evolved allopatrically elsewhere, for example, only later moving to the island in two separate invasions.
The two studies published this month in Nature are among the best ever published, in the opinion of some of sympatric speciation's toughest critics.
In one study, Axel Meyer of the University of Konstanz in Germany and his colleagues examined two species of fish that live in Lake Apoyo, a volcanic crater lake in Nicaragua. One species, the Midas cichlid (Amphilophus citrinellus), has a big body and uses powerful jaws to crush snails at the lake bottom. The slender arrow cichlid (A. zaliosus) lives in the open water, where it eats insect larvae.
Lake Apoyo formed less than 23,000 years ago when its volcano became extinct and filled with rain water. Dr. Meyer's team studied the DNA of the two cichlids and compared it to that of fish in neighboring lakes. They concluded that the Midas cichlid originally invaded the lake, perhaps swept in during a hurricane. The arrow cichlids then branched off the Midas cichlids, evolving a distinct body and no longer breeding with their parent species.
The origin of the arrow cichlids did not take long, geologically speaking. "It was less than 10,000 years, but it could be as short as 2,000 years," Dr. Meyer said.
Dr. Meyer suspects that the arrow cichlid evolved from slender Midas cichlids and shifted from a diet of snails to a diet of insect larvae. They enjoyed more reproductive success if they mated with other slender cichlids, because their offspring could swim efficiently in the open water. Over time, the fish may have evolved the mating preferences that now help keep the two populations distinct.
Dr. Baker and his colleagues present a similar picture of the kentia palm. The kentia palm grows only on Lord Howe Island, 350 miles east of Australia. The island is home to a similar species, Howea belmoreana. The kentia palm grows about 50 feet high, while Howea belmoreana reaches only about 20 feet. Kentia palms thrive on exposures of soft sedimentary rock, while Howea belmoreana grows mostly on soils formed from volcanic rock.
By studying the palm's DNA, Dr. Baker and his colleagues found that the two Lord Howe species are much more alike than either is to any other living palm. Based on the mutations accumulated in each species, they estimate that an ancestral palm arrived on the island long after the island formed about seven million years ago.
About two million years ago, the sedimentary outcrops began to be exposed on the island. This was also the time when kentia palm split off from Howea belmoreana. Dr. Baker and his colleagues propose that the kentia palm evolved from palms that colonized the new outcrops. They were still close enough to the other palms to interbreed. But growing on the sedimentary soil may have changed the growth of their flowers.
The scientists have found that the kentia palm flowers seven weeks earlier than Howea belmoreana, making it almost impossible for them to interbreed.
"It's hard to imagine a more watertight case," Dr. Baker said.
Critics have raised a few possible alternative explanations for each study. It is possible, for example, that the palms might have evolved through geographic isolation on other islands. Their descendants then colonized Lord Howe Island, and then the other islands sank underwater. (Lord Howe is expected to disappear in 200,000 years.)
But even these critics consider these alternatives a bit of a stretch.
"I've read these papers fairly carefully, looking for weak points," said Douglas Futuyma of the State University of New York at Stony Brook. "But I can't find any."
Really? The Claim: Skipping Breakfast Can Affect Your Mood and Energy Levels During the Day
By ANAHAD O'CONNOR, The New York Times, February 21, 2006
THE FACTS Despite what parents and doctors have long recommended, many Americans begin their days with little more than a cup of tea or coffee, and in some cases with nothing at all.
That may seem like a good way to save time or money, but a morning without breakfast will probably cost you in other ways.
Over the years, a number of studies have examined the subject, and most have reached the same conclusion: starting a day without a solid meal tends to have slight but detectable effects on mood, memory and energy level.
In one study, published in the journal Physiological Behavior in 1999, a team of British researchers had 144 healthy adults fast overnight and then separate into several groups in the morning.
One group was allowed to eat a moderate breakfast, another ate nothing and a third had only coffee. The subjects were then monitored over several hours.
Those that ate nothing, the study found, did the worst on memory tests and had the highest levels of fatigue at noon, four hours after they awoke.
The coffee group, meanwhile, suffered no fatigue but had slightly lower scores on mental skills tests than those who had eaten a full breakfast.
Other studies have had similar findings. But research also suggests that the physiological effects of skipping breakfast tend to wear off after eating a normal lunch except in cases where the meal is so large it puts you in a stupor.
THE BOTTOM LINE Skipping breakfast can have short-term effects on memory and energy levels.
The Unconscious Mind: A Great Decision Maker
By BENEDICT CAREY, The New York Times, February 21, 2006
Snap judgments about people and places can be remarkably accurate, and there is no substitute for simple logic and reflection in determining questions like which alarm clock or cellphone is the best value.
But many more important decisions — choosing the right apartment, the optimal house, the best vacation — turn on such a bewildering swarm of facts that people often throw up their hands and put the whole thing temporarily out of mind. And new research suggests that this may be a rewarding strategy.
In a series of experiments reported last week in the journal Science, a team of Dutch psychologists found that people struggling to make complex decisions did best when they were distracted and were not able to think consciously about the choice at all.
The research not only backs up the common advice to "sleep on it" when facing difficult choices, but it also suggests that the unconscious brain can actively reason as well as produce weird dreams and Freudian slips.
"This is very elegant work, and like any great work, it opens up as many questions as it answers" about the unconscious, said Timothy D. Wilson, a psychologist at the University of Virginia and the author of the book "Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious." He was not involved in the research.
Psychologists have known for years that people process an enormous amount of information unconsciously — for example, when they hear their names pop up in a conversation across the room that they were not consciously listening to. But the new report suggests that people take this wealth of under-the-radar information, combine it with deliberately studied facts and impressions and then make astute judgments that they would not otherwise form.
In the study, the research team, led by Ap Dijksterhuis of the University of Amsterdam, had 80 students choose among four cars based on a list of attributes for each, like age, gasoline mileage, transmission and handling. After presenting the attributes in quick succession, the researchers instructed some students to think carefully about the decision for four minutes and distracted others by asking them to solve anagrams.
When the list of characteristics was four items, students were more likely to pick the best functioning vehicles if they reasoned through the decision, rather than if they were distracted. But with 12 attributes, the distracted anagram solvers tended to make wiser choices, the study found.
The unconscious brain has a far greater capacity for information than conscious working memory, the authors write, and it may be less susceptible to certain biases.
"One example is people who like a house for its space but don't properly weigh in the effect of commuting distance until they're spending two hours on the train every day," said Dr. Dijksterhuis. The unconscious brain might give the commuting more weight, he said.
The researchers developed a "complexity score" for 40 products and assets based on how many of each item's attributes people took into account. Cars, computers and apartments were at the top, dresses and shirts in the middle and oven mitts and umbrellas at the bottom.
Using that scale, the psychologists surveyed students who had recently bought some of those items and found that the more the buyers thought about their purchases of simple objects, the more satisfied they were. But the opposite was the case for complex purchases, where the more time spent in conscious deliberation, the less satisfied the students were.
In a survey of shoppers outside furniture and department stores, the researchers found a similar relationship between the amount of time shoppers spent thinking about simple and more involved decisions and their later satisfaction with their purchases. The research is only a stab at characterizing a process that is mostly unknown, psychologists say.
For example, the studies did not take into account the effect of emotion or memory on the unconscious, both of which can sway decisions. Nor is it clear exactly which kinds of decisions are best handled by letting go.
"Are we saying that an executive who has just read an important report should not think about it?" said Jonathan Schooler, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia. "The research helps us work toward an answer, but I don't think we're quite there yet."
Vital Signs: Money and Medicine: Richer or Poorer, Health and Wealth Are Linked
By NICHOLAS BAKALAR, The New York Times, February 21, 2006
A new report issued last week adds support to the premise that poor people are in worse physical condition and have an increased risk for death compared with those who are better off.
The findings, published last week in The Journal of the American Medical Association, examined more than 30,000 patients consecutively referred to the Cleveland Clinic for stress testing. The researchers assigned a socioeconomic status score to each patient by matching the home address to economic data in the 2000 census.
Patients exercised on a treadmill while being measured for the maximum amount of oxygen they consumed during exercise, usually called functional capacity, and for heart rate recovery, or the amount the heart rate decreases during the first minute after exercise.
Both slower heart rate recovery and lower functional capacity were associated with lower socioeconomic status, even after controlling for age, race, smoking and body mass index.
The subjects were then followed for an average of six and a half years, through February 2004, to track their survival.
There were 2,174 deaths during the period, and patients in the lowest quarter of socioeconomic status score were twice as likely to have died as those in the highest quarter, even though the two groups did not differ in age, sex, race or current smoking habits.
Dr. Michael S. Lauer, the study's senior author and a professor of medicine and epidemiology at Case Western Reserve University, said that poverty itself could be a cause of disease or death.
"Some people think that poverty causes stress to the autonomic nervous system, the part that regulates blood pressure and heart rate," Dr. Lauer said. "Stress to the autonomic nervous system can manifest as hypertension and poor fitness."
By BONNIE DeSIMONE, The New York Times, February 21, 2006
PHILADELPHIA — Patrick Fitzgerald found himself distracted as he studied for the bar exam at Fordham University five years ago. New York City was debating the merits of continuing its recycling program and Mr. FitzGerald wondered why that was a question at all. "I wasn't an overt tree-hugger, but I thought it was odd," he said.
He began poking around Web sites and news articles about the economics of recycling, and concluded that one of the industry's biggest problems was motivating its suppliers — the people who generate garbage.
Moral obligation — or even compassion for trees — was not enough to induce good recycling habits, Mr. FitzGerald decided. Instead of spending money on campaigns to persuade people to recycle, he thought: What if you paid them directly? What would happen?
In late 2002, he talked about the idea with Ron Gonen, a high school classmate and fellow Philadelphia-area native. Before long, the project swallowed up their lives and maxed out their credit cards.
Mr. FitzGerald quit his job at a Wall Street law firm, moved back into his mother's attic in suburban Philadelphia and began working the phones and Internet search engines, making contacts in the solid-waste industry and finding retailers who were willing to participate in a customer rewards program. Mr. Gonen, then in his first year in the M.B.A. program at Columbia University, put in late nights writing a business plan and software, becoming "more and more involved and obsessed."
Their teamwork led to the birth of RecycleBank (recyclebank.com) in early 2004. The logo is a piggy bank whose hind end is a recycling bin, embodying consumer incentives and environmental consciousness.
The process seems elegantly simple. Households get credit for the weight of materials they recycle, which is scanned and recorded through a computer chip embedded in the garbage bins when they are picked up by the sanitation crew. They exchange that credit for coupons at various businesses. Municipal officials save disposal fees. Recycling companies make more money from processing. Retailers gain the feel-good association with a socially beneficial activity.
RecycleBank charges municipalities (or private haulers, depending on the arrangement) $24 a household, and guarantees clients that they will save at least that much in disposal fees as waste is diverted from landfills and incinerators. The company also receives revenue from recycling plants, depending on how much it increases the amount of materials that are processed.
"I thought the idea had tremendous merit right from the start," said Clifford J. Schorer Jr., who helped mentor Mr. Gonen in his position as entrepreneur in residence at the Eugene M. Lang Center for Entrepreneurship at Columbia. The university contributed $100,000 to RecycleBank's seed money.
Residents participating in RecycleBank can check their "balance" online and cash in their coupons — a maximum of $25 a month, $400 a year — at several dozen national chains like Starbucks, Home Depot and Bed Bath & Beyond. The Coca-Cola Company set up a Green Community Fund, where coupons can be donated to environmental education programs in the Philadelphia public schools and public libraries.
During its start last year in Philadelphia, RecycleBank also established relationships with local businesses like the Chestnut Hill Cheese Shop and the Reading Terminal Market, where about 25 specialty vendors accept the coupons.
One problem for the RecycleBank was trying to find a way to measure the volume of recyclable goods generated by a household and credit that amount to participants. Through Web searches and phone calls, the men identified Cascade Engineering in Grand Rapids, Mich., which provided free several thousand 35- and 64-gallon bins embedded with RFID (radio frequency identification) technology as part of its research and development budget.
The "smart waste" tag, a combination computer chip and bar code, enables the bins to be scanned and weighed and the amount linked to a household. The information is channeled from an on-board computer in the garbage trucks into a databank.
The LTS Scale Corporation of Twinsburg, Ohio, was able to configure scales and a tipping mechanism for the containers, which fit on the back of the trucks so the bins can be weighed and easily emptied.
Why not cheat by adding a bowling ball or other heavy nonrecyclable items to the trash? RecycleBank came up with a button on the on-board computer that workers can press to flag the address if they notice contraband. This happens "less than rarely," Mr. FitzGerald said.
Both men, who are 30 years old, decided early on that it was important to spare households the tedium of separating glass, paper, plastic and metal. They signed on with the Philadelphia-based Blue Mountain Recycling, which uses sorting technology employing fans, gravity, magnets and manual picking.
RecycleBank persuaded Philadelphia officials to allow it to conduct a pilot project involving 2,500 households in two Philadelphia neighborhoods, upscale Chestnut Hill and modest West Oak Lane. Six months later, 90 percent of the households in both neighborhoods were participating, up from 35 percent in Chestnut Hill and 7 percent in West Oak Lane — averaging 25 pounds a week of recyclables per home. The city is considering whether to contract for the service and extend it.
The project's success has helped Mr. FitzGerald and Mr. Gonen to sell the RecycleBank program to several municipalities in the mid-Atlantic and New England regions. Officials in Wilmington, Del., will begin a RecycleBank plan with an initial 4,000 households on April 1.
The company's largest expansion occurred when Blue Mountain was acquired by Casella Waste Systems in Rutland, Vt., in September. Casella plans to introduce the RecycleBank program to 100,000 households in New England next year.
Mr. Gonen said the fast start had been exhilarating, but added, "I'm very focused on putting on the brakes when they need to be put on."
Palm Trees and Lake Fish Dispel Doubts About a Theory of Evolution
By CARL ZIMMER, The New York Times, ebruary 21, 2006
Sooner or later, everyone encounters a kentia palm. Its ability to grow in low sunlight has made it one of the world's most traded houseplants.
"If you've been to a wine bar or to Starbucks, there may have been one in there," said William Baker, a botanist at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, England.
"Whether you realize it or not, you're familiar with this palm," he said.
As ordinary as this houseplant may be, however, Dr. Baker and colleagues have found that it has an extraordinary story to tell about evolution.
The kentia palm (Howea forsteriana) is found in the wild only on a single remote island in the South Pacific. Based on a recent study, Dr. Baker and his colleagues have concluded that roughly two million years ago, an ancestral species of palm tree living on the island split in two, and one became the kentia palm.
The idea that members of a species living side by side can split into two species is controversial. Some scientists have presented evidence that the process has produced several species of plants and animals, but their ideas have met with intense skepticism.
Two new studies in the journal Nature — one on the kentia palm and a second on fish in a Nicaraguan lake — are impressing some leading skeptics, however.
One reason for the skepticism is that another way for forming new species is well supported by evidence. When a population becomes isolated by a geographical barrier, it can evolve into a new species.
Birds swept to a remote island, for example, may reproduce only among themselves and not with the rest of their species back on the mainland.
Over generations, the birds can acquire a unique set of mutations. They may evolve to be so different from the mainland birds that the two populations can no longer interbreed. They may sing different courtship songs, for example. They may be able to mate, but their hybrids may prove to be sterile. Based on a vast amount of research, scientists agree that this process — called allopatric speciation — drove the evolution of many species.
But some scientists have suggested that some species evolved without geographical barriers and that a new species could emerge from an old one even when all its members were living side by side. The key was for some individuals to begin to mate with one another and not with the rest of the species. If this tendency could be inherited, then two genetically distinct populations could emerge. Ultimately, they would become two separate species.
Mathematical models have suggested this process — known as sympatric speciation — can happen under certain conditions. And scientists have discovered a handful of cases in which, they argue, sympatric speciation took place. Fruit flies from a species that originally lived on hawthorns in the United States, for example, have shifted to apples in the past 150 years. Their DNA suggests that they are diverging from the hawthorn population.
But sympatric speciation has drawn fierce criticism. Skeptics have argued that many cases of sympatric speciation could just as easily have been produced by allopatric speciation. Two species sharing an island may well have evolved allopatrically elsewhere, for example, only later moving to the island in two separate invasions.
The two studies published this month in Nature are among the best ever published, in the opinion of some of sympatric speciation's toughest critics.
In one study, Axel Meyer of the University of Konstanz in Germany and his colleagues examined two species of fish that live in Lake Apoyo, a volcanic crater lake in Nicaragua. One species, the Midas cichlid (Amphilophus citrinellus), has a big body and uses powerful jaws to crush snails at the lake bottom. The slender arrow cichlid (A. zaliosus) lives in the open water, where it eats insect larvae.
Lake Apoyo formed less than 23,000 years ago when its volcano became extinct and filled with rain water. Dr. Meyer's team studied the DNA of the two cichlids and compared it to that of fish in neighboring lakes. They concluded that the Midas cichlid originally invaded the lake, perhaps swept in during a hurricane. The arrow cichlids then branched off the Midas cichlids, evolving a distinct body and no longer breeding with their parent species.
The origin of the arrow cichlids did not take long, geologically speaking. "It was less than 10,000 years, but it could be as short as 2,000 years," Dr. Meyer said.
Dr. Meyer suspects that the arrow cichlid evolved from slender Midas cichlids and shifted from a diet of snails to a diet of insect larvae. They enjoyed more reproductive success if they mated with other slender cichlids, because their offspring could swim efficiently in the open water. Over time, the fish may have evolved the mating preferences that now help keep the two populations distinct.
Dr. Baker and his colleagues present a similar picture of the kentia palm. The kentia palm grows only on Lord Howe Island, 350 miles east of Australia. The island is home to a similar species, Howea belmoreana. The kentia palm grows about 50 feet high, while Howea belmoreana reaches only about 20 feet. Kentia palms thrive on exposures of soft sedimentary rock, while Howea belmoreana grows mostly on soils formed from volcanic rock.
By studying the palm's DNA, Dr. Baker and his colleagues found that the two Lord Howe species are much more alike than either is to any other living palm. Based on the mutations accumulated in each species, they estimate that an ancestral palm arrived on the island long after the island formed about seven million years ago.
About two million years ago, the sedimentary outcrops began to be exposed on the island. This was also the time when kentia palm split off from Howea belmoreana. Dr. Baker and his colleagues propose that the kentia palm evolved from palms that colonized the new outcrops. They were still close enough to the other palms to interbreed. But growing on the sedimentary soil may have changed the growth of their flowers.
The scientists have found that the kentia palm flowers seven weeks earlier than Howea belmoreana, making it almost impossible for them to interbreed.
"It's hard to imagine a more watertight case," Dr. Baker said.
Critics have raised a few possible alternative explanations for each study. It is possible, for example, that the palms might have evolved through geographic isolation on other islands. Their descendants then colonized Lord Howe Island, and then the other islands sank underwater. (Lord Howe is expected to disappear in 200,000 years.)
But even these critics consider these alternatives a bit of a stretch.
"I've read these papers fairly carefully, looking for weak points," said Douglas Futuyma of the State University of New York at Stony Brook. "But I can't find any."
Really? The Claim: Skipping Breakfast Can Affect Your Mood and Energy Levels During the Day
By ANAHAD O'CONNOR, The New York Times, February 21, 2006
THE FACTS Despite what parents and doctors have long recommended, many Americans begin their days with little more than a cup of tea or coffee, and in some cases with nothing at all.
That may seem like a good way to save time or money, but a morning without breakfast will probably cost you in other ways.
Over the years, a number of studies have examined the subject, and most have reached the same conclusion: starting a day without a solid meal tends to have slight but detectable effects on mood, memory and energy level.
In one study, published in the journal Physiological Behavior in 1999, a team of British researchers had 144 healthy adults fast overnight and then separate into several groups in the morning.
One group was allowed to eat a moderate breakfast, another ate nothing and a third had only coffee. The subjects were then monitored over several hours.
Those that ate nothing, the study found, did the worst on memory tests and had the highest levels of fatigue at noon, four hours after they awoke.
The coffee group, meanwhile, suffered no fatigue but had slightly lower scores on mental skills tests than those who had eaten a full breakfast.
Other studies have had similar findings. But research also suggests that the physiological effects of skipping breakfast tend to wear off after eating a normal lunch except in cases where the meal is so large it puts you in a stupor.
THE BOTTOM LINE Skipping breakfast can have short-term effects on memory and energy levels.
The Unconscious Mind: A Great Decision Maker
By BENEDICT CAREY, The New York Times, February 21, 2006
Snap judgments about people and places can be remarkably accurate, and there is no substitute for simple logic and reflection in determining questions like which alarm clock or cellphone is the best value.
But many more important decisions — choosing the right apartment, the optimal house, the best vacation — turn on such a bewildering swarm of facts that people often throw up their hands and put the whole thing temporarily out of mind. And new research suggests that this may be a rewarding strategy.
In a series of experiments reported last week in the journal Science, a team of Dutch psychologists found that people struggling to make complex decisions did best when they were distracted and were not able to think consciously about the choice at all.
The research not only backs up the common advice to "sleep on it" when facing difficult choices, but it also suggests that the unconscious brain can actively reason as well as produce weird dreams and Freudian slips.
"This is very elegant work, and like any great work, it opens up as many questions as it answers" about the unconscious, said Timothy D. Wilson, a psychologist at the University of Virginia and the author of the book "Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious." He was not involved in the research.
Psychologists have known for years that people process an enormous amount of information unconsciously — for example, when they hear their names pop up in a conversation across the room that they were not consciously listening to. But the new report suggests that people take this wealth of under-the-radar information, combine it with deliberately studied facts and impressions and then make astute judgments that they would not otherwise form.
In the study, the research team, led by Ap Dijksterhuis of the University of Amsterdam, had 80 students choose among four cars based on a list of attributes for each, like age, gasoline mileage, transmission and handling. After presenting the attributes in quick succession, the researchers instructed some students to think carefully about the decision for four minutes and distracted others by asking them to solve anagrams.
When the list of characteristics was four items, students were more likely to pick the best functioning vehicles if they reasoned through the decision, rather than if they were distracted. But with 12 attributes, the distracted anagram solvers tended to make wiser choices, the study found.
The unconscious brain has a far greater capacity for information than conscious working memory, the authors write, and it may be less susceptible to certain biases.
"One example is people who like a house for its space but don't properly weigh in the effect of commuting distance until they're spending two hours on the train every day," said Dr. Dijksterhuis. The unconscious brain might give the commuting more weight, he said.
The researchers developed a "complexity score" for 40 products and assets based on how many of each item's attributes people took into account. Cars, computers and apartments were at the top, dresses and shirts in the middle and oven mitts and umbrellas at the bottom.
Using that scale, the psychologists surveyed students who had recently bought some of those items and found that the more the buyers thought about their purchases of simple objects, the more satisfied they were. But the opposite was the case for complex purchases, where the more time spent in conscious deliberation, the less satisfied the students were.
In a survey of shoppers outside furniture and department stores, the researchers found a similar relationship between the amount of time shoppers spent thinking about simple and more involved decisions and their later satisfaction with their purchases. The research is only a stab at characterizing a process that is mostly unknown, psychologists say.
For example, the studies did not take into account the effect of emotion or memory on the unconscious, both of which can sway decisions. Nor is it clear exactly which kinds of decisions are best handled by letting go.
"Are we saying that an executive who has just read an important report should not think about it?" said Jonathan Schooler, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia. "The research helps us work toward an answer, but I don't think we're quite there yet."
Vital Signs: Money and Medicine: Richer or Poorer, Health and Wealth Are Linked
By NICHOLAS BAKALAR, The New York Times, February 21, 2006
A new report issued last week adds support to the premise that poor people are in worse physical condition and have an increased risk for death compared with those who are better off.
The findings, published last week in The Journal of the American Medical Association, examined more than 30,000 patients consecutively referred to the Cleveland Clinic for stress testing. The researchers assigned a socioeconomic status score to each patient by matching the home address to economic data in the 2000 census.
Patients exercised on a treadmill while being measured for the maximum amount of oxygen they consumed during exercise, usually called functional capacity, and for heart rate recovery, or the amount the heart rate decreases during the first minute after exercise.
Both slower heart rate recovery and lower functional capacity were associated with lower socioeconomic status, even after controlling for age, race, smoking and body mass index.
The subjects were then followed for an average of six and a half years, through February 2004, to track their survival.
There were 2,174 deaths during the period, and patients in the lowest quarter of socioeconomic status score were twice as likely to have died as those in the highest quarter, even though the two groups did not differ in age, sex, race or current smoking habits.
Dr. Michael S. Lauer, the study's senior author and a professor of medicine and epidemiology at Case Western Reserve University, said that poverty itself could be a cause of disease or death.
"Some people think that poverty causes stress to the autonomic nervous system, the part that regulates blood pressure and heart rate," Dr. Lauer said. "Stress to the autonomic nervous system can manifest as hypertension and poor fitness."
