scientific news

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X-rays in 3-D show nanosized details

 

A new X-ray microscope technique gives a super-detailed look inside small samples, and does it in 3-D.

An international team of scientists used the method to look inside a tiny piece of mouse bone to reveal inner details as small as 100 nanometers, such as hidey-holes for bone cells and connecting channels between those pockets.

The new technique, published in the Sept. 23 Nature, rolls several new technologies into one. A powerful X-ray source sends a beam through a sample to a highly sensitive photon-counting detector without the need for an image-forming lens.

On their way through the object, X-rays are slightly scattered by variations in the density of the material. The detector measures the intensity of the scattered waves and a powerful computer program uses that information to reconstruct a two-dimensional image of the sample.

After an image is made at each degree in a 180-degree view of the material, a computer program puts all the images together to get a three-dimensional image, similar to the way a CT brain scan is put together. The 3-D reconstruction shows tiny inner variations in density never before measurable.

This type of imaging won’t work in living things, because the X-ray dose is too high and the technology too expensive, says study coauthor and X-ray physicist Pierre Thibault of the Technical University of Munich’s campus in Garching, Germany.

But researchers can take biopsies to look at small samples, for example to see what happens during bone loss from osteoporosis, he says. The technique could also be useful in materials science to look at how metals mix together to create new alloys, or how a material develops tiny fractures.

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The mosquito that first injected Homo sapiens with the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum didn’t pick it up from humans’ closest primate relative, the chimpanzee, but from the western gorilla, new research suggests. The primary cause of malaria in humans, P. falciparum is most closely related to another species of Plasmodium that infects gorillas, scientists report in the Sept. 23 Nature.

The discovery vindicates chimpanzees: Previous research suggested that the human-infecting P. falciparum was most closely related the chimp-infecting version of the parasite, P. reichenowi. This notion fit with a tidy picture of host-parasite evolution, suggesting the malaria parasite lineage split at the same time as the chimp-human lineage. But Plasmodium DNA collected from more than 2,500 fecal samples of eastern gorillas, western gorillas, bonobos and chimpanzees points to western gorillas as the source. The evidence also suggests the jump happened only once, says study leader Beatrice Hahn of the University of Alabama at Birmingham. As for the time frame of that event, scientists are still scratching their heads.

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Dr.Kristie Leong

Many people have busy schedules that don’t allow them the luxury of sitting down to a leisurely meal. Instead, they grab something fast from a drive-through window - or scarf down a brown bag lunch before returning to their to-do list. Not only does eating too fast lead to indigestion, it also contributes to weight gain – and the growing problem of obesity. Is speed eating causing you to gain weight?

 

Does Eating Too Fast Really Cause Weight Gain?

 

Eating too quickly leads to weight gain, mainly by causing you to overeat. In a study published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, men who devoured a large serving of ice cream in five minutes had lower levels of hormones that cause satiety than men who took thirty minutes to finish their treat. Despite eating a big bowl of ice cream, the men who ate in only five minutes weren’t full.

 

When you eat too fast, you don’t give the stomach time to tell the brain that it’s had enough – so you keep on eating. It takes twenty minutes for brain-signaling hormones to signal the brain that it no longer needs food. The key is not to eat too much during that twenty minute time period.

 

Eating Too Quickly is an Unconscious Habit for Some

 

Some people aren’t aware that they’re eating too fast - so ingrained is the speed-eating habit. They’re so used to wolfing down food that the experience of tasting what they’re eating no longer registers. This type of mindless eating is sure-fire recipe for weight gain – as well as indigestion and heartburn. The health consequences of eating too quickly go beyond simple weight control.

 

How to Stop Eating Too Fast

 

Make a conscious effort to slow down the pace of a meal until it becomes second nature.

 

Train yourself to set down your fork after each bite, and pick it up again only when your mouth is empty.

 

Focus on the taste and smell of what you’re eating and describe the flavors in your mind.

 

Cut back on the size of each bite or use chopsticks instead of a fork to train yourself to put smaller portions in your mouth.

 

Pay attention to signals that indicate you’re full, and don’t eat past that point.

 

If you’re eating with someone, focus on the conversation rather than on what’s on your plate.

 

Play slow, new age music in the background during a meal to set the pace. It’s hard to speed-eat when Yanni is playing in the background.

 

Eating Too Fast: The Bottom Line?

 

Learn how to take it slow at meal time. You’ll consume fewer calories – and actually taste your food again.

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Being willing and able to adapt your behavior increases your ability to communicate and build relationships with other people. The concept of adaptability, as developed by Dr. Michael O’Connor, my co-author of The Platinum Rule (Warner Books, August 1996), is a two-part process. It combines flexibility with versatility. Flexibility is your willingness to adapt. It’s your attitude.

 

Versatility is your ability to adapt. It’s your aptitude. People with adaptability are both flexible and versatile. Of course, our level of adaptability can be stronger in some situations than others. For example, we tend to be more adaptable at work with people we know less, and less adaptable at home with people we know better. In addition, research shows that people view themselves as more flexible and versatile than they actually are. That’s because we all aspire to those behaviors, and we judge ourselves on how we intend to act as well as on how we do act. But unfortunately, our actions don’t always match our intentions. Another reason for the gap between our ideal versus our actual level of adaptability is that it’s not easy. That’s why it’s also important to know the 10 characteristics that undermine your ability to adapt—the negative traits that undermine your adaptability. Let’s look now at the 10 positive characteristics for adaptability. We’ll start with flexibility.

 

The first half of the high-adaptability formula—Flexibility

 

High flexibility is characterized by these five attributes: confidence, tolerance, empathy, positiveness and respect for others. The first attribute, confidence, means that you believe in yourself; you trust your own judgement and resourcefulness.

 

The second high flexibility attribute is tolerance. That means you’re open to accepting opinions and practices different from your own. We can easily think of people who are intolerant of others because of religious or political beliefs. Those intolerant folks may attract like-minded people, but they don’t gain the attention of a diverse audience.

 

Third, is empathy. The root of the word empathy is pathos, which means “feeling” in Greek. Empathy is a term for deep feeling. It means, “I feel what you feel. I can put myself in your shoes.” Another word with the same root, sympathy, means merely acknowledging someone else’s feelings. It results in kindness and pity, and it comes from the head. Empathy results in feeling the pain, or the joy, of the other person. It comes from the heart.

 

The fourth high-flexibility attribute is positiveness. The late Dr. Norman Vincent Peale’s book The Power of Positive Thinking has sold well for more than 40 years because it contains such a universal truth. A positive attitude leads to positive events in your life.

 

And the fifth high-flexibility characteristic is respect for others. This is the sincere desire to understand and consider other people’s choices, commitments and needs in relation to yours.

 

The other side of the adaptability coin: The negative traits that undermine your adaptability. If you recognize any of these in yourself, try to improve your adaptability by eliminating this negative tendency from your behavior.

 

Negative flexibility is characterized by:

 

Rigidity—“It’s my way or the highway”

 

Competition with Others—“I’m smarter, prettier, etc., than you”

 

Discontent—“No, I don’t like it this way. Why can’t we...”

 

Unapproachable—“Don’t bother me unless it’s worth my time and you agree with me”

 

Difficulty with Ambiguity—“Let’s nail this down right now”

 

The second half of the high-adaptability formula—Versatility

 

The five high-versatility traits are resilience, vision, attentiveness, competence and self-correction. Resilience means knowing how to overcome setbacks, barriers and limited resources. Mainly, it has to do with your emotional strength. Remember Raiders of the Lost Ark? Larry Kasdan’s hugely successful script was turned down dozens of times before someone finally shared his vision. How many cold calls that turn out to be, “No thank you,” can you bounce back from? If you keep on going until you succeed, that’s resilience.

 

Vision is the second high-versatility trait. I think it’s easy to see why someone who has the power to imagine, to be creative, to suggest alternatives, is going to be more influential than someone who can’t.

 

Next, is attentiveness. That means being aware of elements in the environment. It can be as simple as noticing when someone is getting bored, or sensing that now is not the right time to present your ideas. It’s knowing when to act and when not to act. It means paying attention to more than your own needs.

 

The fourth high-versatility trait is competence. Competence begins with expertise. And it also involves a problem-solving ability that goes beyond your specialty. If you don’t know how to answer a question or fix a problem, you can find someone who does. It means having a can-do attitude and following through on it.

 

And the fifth high-versatility trait is self-correction. That means that once you initiate a project, you ask for feedback and place high priority on problem solving, not on being right. It means you’re able to see when you’ve developed a nonproductive pattern in your behavior. It’s being able to say, “I think this approach isn’t working. I’d better try something different.”

 

Negative versatility is characterized by:

 

Subjectiveness—“This is the way it looks to ME”

 

Bluntness—“That’s a stupid idea!”

 

Resistance—“This is the way we’ve always done it”

 

Single-Mindedness—“It’s my goal and nothing else matters”

 

Unreasonable Risk-Taking—“I’m going to jump; won’t you come with me?”

 

Developing your adaptability allows you to understand how different types of people would like to be treated. It does not mean imitating the other person’s behavior. It does mean adjusting your behavior to be more in line with the other person’s preferences. The effectively adaptable person meets the other person’s needs and his own. He knows how to negotiate relationships in a way that allows everyone to win. With adaptability you are practicing the spirit of the Golden Rule, which I call The Platinum Rule, and can treat the other person the way he wants to be treated.

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The weetest victory is the one that’s most difficult. The one that requires you to reach down deep inside, to fight with everything you’ve got, to be willing to leave everything out there on the battlefield—without knowing, until that do-or-die moment, if your heroic effort will be enough.

 

Society doesn’t reward defeat, and you won’t find many failures documented in history books. The exceptions are those failures that become steppingstones to later success. Such is the case with Thomas Edison, whose most memorable invention was the light bulb, which purportedly took him 1,000 tries before he developed a successful prototype. “How did it feel to fail 1,000 times?” a reporter asked. “I didn’t fail 1,000 times,” Edison responded. “The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps.”

 

Unlike Edison, many of us avoid the prospect of failure. In fact, we’re so focused on not failing that we don’t aim for success, settling instead for a life of mediocrity. When we do make missteps, we gloss over them, selectively editing out the miscalculations or mistakes in our life’s résumé.

 

“Failure is not an option,” NASA flight controller Jerry C. Bostick reportedly stated during the mission to bring the damaged Apollo 13 back to Earth, and that phrase has been etched into the collective memory ever since.

 

To many in our success-driven society, failure isn’t just considered a non-option—it’s deemed a deficiency, says Kathryn Schulz, author of Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error. “Of all the things we are wrong about, this idea of error might well top the list,” Schulz says. “It is our meta-mistake: We are wrong about what it means to be wrong. Far from being a sign of intellectual inferiority, the capacity to err is crucial to human cognition.”

Life’s Greatest Teacher

 

When we take a closer look at the great thinkers throughout history, a willingness to take on failure isn’t a new or extraordinary thought at all. From the likes of Augustine, Darwin and Freud to the business mavericks and sports legends of today, failure is as powerful a tool as any in reaching great success.

 

“Failure and defeat are life’s greatest teachers [but] sadly, most people, and particularly conservative corporate cultures, don’t want to go there,” says Ralph Heath, managing partner of Synergy Leadership Group and author of Celebrating Failure: The Power of Taking Risks, Making Mistakes and Thinking Big. “Instead they choose to play it safe, to fly below the radar, repeating the same safe choices over and over again. They operate under the belief that if they make no waves, they attract no attention; no one will yell at them for failing because they generally never attempt anything great at which they could possibly fail (or succeed).”

 

However, in today’s post-recession economy, some employers are no longer shying away from failure—they’re embracing it. According to a recent article in BusinessWeek, many companies are deliberately seeking out those with track records reflecting both failure and success, believing that those who have been in the trenches, survived battle and come out on the other side have irreplaceable experience and perseverance. They’re veterans of failure.

 

The prevailing school of thought in progressive companies—such as Intuit, General Electric, Corning and Virgin Atlantic—is that great success depends on great risk, and failure is simply a common byproduct. Executives of such organizations don’t mourn their mistakes but instead parlay them into future gains.

 

“The quickest road to success is to possess an attitude toward failure of ‘no fear,’ ” says Heath. “To do their work well, to be successful and to keep their companies competitive, leaders and workers on the front lines need to stick their necks out a mile every day. They have to deliver risky, edgy, breakthrough ideas, plans, presentations, advice, technology, products, leadership, bills and more. And they have to deliver all this fearlessly—without any fear whatsoever of failure, rejection or punishment.”

Reaching Your Potential

 

 

The same holds true for personal quests, whether in overcoming some specific challenge or reaching your full potential in all aspects of life. To achieve your personal best, to reach unparalleled heights, to make the impossible possible, you can’t fear failure, you must think big, and you have to push yourself.

When we think of people with this mindset, we imagine the daredevils, the pioneers, the inventors, the explorers: They embrace failure as a necessary step to unprecedented success.

 

But you don’t have to walk a tightrope, climb Mount Everest or cure polio to employ this mindset in your own life. When the rewards of success are great, embracing possible failure is key to taking on a variety of challenges, whether you’re reinventing yourself by starting a new business or allowing yourself to trust another person to build a deeper relationship.

 

“To achieve any worthy goal, you must take risks,” says writer and speaker John C. Maxwell. In his book Failing Forward: Turning Mistakes into Stepping Stones for Success, he points to the example of legendary aviator Amelia Earhart, who set several records and achieved many firsts in her lifetime, including being the first female pilot to fly solo over the Atlantic Ocean. Although her final flight proved fateful, Maxwell believes she knew the risk—and that the potential reward was worth it. “[Earhart’s] advice when it came to risk was simple and direct: ‘Decide whether or not the goal is worth the risks involved. If it is, stop worrying.’ ”

 

Of course, the risks you take should be calculated; you shouldn’t fly blindly into the night and simply hope for the best. Achieving the goal or at least waging a heroic effort requires preparation, practice and some awareness of your skills and talents.

Easing Into a Fearless Mindset

 

“One of the biggest secrets to success is operating inside your strength zone but outside of your comfort zone,” Heath says. Although you might fail incredibly, you might succeed incredibly—and that’s why incredible risk and courage are requisite. Either way, you’ll learn more than ever about your strengths, talents and resolve, and you’ll strengthen your will for the next challenge.

 

If this sounds like dangerous territory, it can be. But there are ways to ease into this fearless mindset. The first is to consciously maintain a positive attitude so that, no matter what you encounter, you’ll be able to see the lessons of the experience and continue to push forward.

 

“It’s true that not everyone is positive by nature,” says Maxwell, who cites his father as someone who would describe himself as a negative person by nature. “Here’s how my dad changed his attitude. First he made a choice: He continually chooses to have a positive attitude. Second, he’s continually reading and listening to materials that bolster that attitude. For example, he’s read The Power of Positive Thinking many times. I didn’t get it at first, so once I asked him why. His response: ‘Son, I need to keep filling the tank so I can stay positive.’ ”

 

Heath recommends studying the failures and subsequent reactions of successful people and, within a business context, repeating such histories for others. “Reward them and applaud their efforts in front of the entire organization so everyone understands it is OK to fail. So employees say to themselves, ‘I see that Bill, the vice president of widgets, who the president adores, failed, and he is not only back at work, but he is driving a hot new sports car. I can fail and come to work the next day. Bill is proof of it.’ ”

 

Finally, Heath stays motivated by the thought that, “if I become complacent and don’t take risks, someone will notice what I am doing and improve upon my efforts over time, and put me out of work. You’ve got to keep finding better ways to run your life, or someone will take what you’ve accomplished, improve upon it, and be very pleased with the results. Keep moving forward or die.”