Infant feeding in Newfoundland and Labrador: perceptions and experiences of maternal grandmothers

The influence of a grandmother can be an important factor in a new mother’s decisions about infant feeding. Research suggests that an important predictor of choosing to breastfeed is whether or not your own mother breastfed her child(ren). In addition mothers state that they need and want their mothers’ support both in making the decision to breastfeed and in being supported while doing so. In Newfoundland and Labrador, many grandmothers who had their children during the 1960s or 1970s when breastfeeding rates were low are unable to pass on helpful breastfeeding advice. However, including the maternal grandmother in a discussion on infant feeding practices with the goal of better understanding their experiences and perspectives is important. The purpose of this study was to examine the primary influences that impacted grandmothers’ choices of infant feeding in Newfoundland and Labrador and to explore the role that grandmothers feel they played in their daughters’ choices about infant feeding. Twenty two maternal grandmothers who bottle fed their children and whose daughters bottle fed their babies were recruited to participate in either one of four focus groups or two semi-structured interviews. Transcripts were analysed using the constant comparative method of analysis to reveal insights into the grandmothers’ perceptions and experiences. Three themes emerged describing how the grandmothers felt about infant feeding: powerlessness, modesty, and ambivalence. These themes provided insight into the way that the grandmothers made decisions about how to feed their babies and the way that they interacted with their daughters in regards to infant feeding. A better understanding of grandmothers’ views of infant feeding may be used to develop an educational intervention to help improve grandmothers’ knowledge and perceptions of breastfeeding and to therefore help mobilize the much needed support their daughters require to breastfeed

Atomic inner-shell X-ray laser at 1.46 nanometres pumped by an X-ray free-electron laser

Since the invention of the laser more than 50 years ago, scientists have striven to achieve amplification on atomic transitions of increasingly shorter wavelength. The introduction of X-ray free-electron lasers makes it possible to pump new atomic X-ray lasers with ultrashort pulse duration, extreme spectral brightness and full temporal coherence. Here we describe the implementation of an X-ray laser in the kiloelectronvolt energy regime, based on atomic population inversion and driven by rapid K-shell photo-ionization using pulses from an X-ray free-electron laser. We established a population inversion of the Kα transition in singly ionized neon at 1.46 nanometres (corresponding to a photon energy of 849 electronvolts) in an elongated plasma column created by irradiation of a gas medium. We observed strong amplified spontaneous emission from the end of the excited plasma. This resulted in femtosecond-duration, high-intensity X-ray pulses of much shorter wavelength and greater brilliance than achieved with previous atomic X-ray lasers. Moreover, this scheme provides greatly increased wavelength stability, monochromaticity and improved temporal coherence by comparison with present-day X-ray free-electron lasers. The atomic X-ray lasers realized here may be useful for high-resolution spectroscopy and nonlinear X-ray studies