Agnes Gavin

Agnes Adele Wangenheim was born in Sydney in 1872. At the age of eighteen, she married Barney Kurtz, but divorced him not long after. She was Agnes Kurtz on the first of October 1898, when she married Sydney-born stage actor John Francis Henry Gavin, then twenty-three years old. They were a striking pair: John, tall and dark, bluff and hearty, with a broad smile; Agnes smaller, attractive, with a clear, olive complexion and bright, dark eyes. Together they worked as actors in the Bland Holt stage company and in vaudeville for many years before entering motion pictures together in H.A. Forsyth’s 1910 production of Thunderbolt in which John played the title character and Agnes may have played a gypsy. The Gavins were not unusual for their time, working as a partnership, but with the husband in the more public and visible role. On Forsyth’s next film, Moonlite (1910), John moved into direction while Agnes played the aboriginal girl Bunda in blackface. John then directed several films in 1911 for Crick and Finlay (Ben Hall and His Gang; Frank Gardiner, King of the Road; The Assigned Servant; Keane of Kalgoorlie) and followed Stanley Crick into the Australian Photo-Play Company, directing The Mark of the Lash (1911). He then branched out on his own, forming John F. Gavin Productions, which produced two further films in 1911: The Drover’s Sweetheart and Assigned to his Wife

Kate Howarde

Catherine Clarissa Jones was born in England and migrated to New Zealand as a child. She married William Henry de Saxe in 1884, and their only child, Florence Adrienne, was born at Christchurch on December 5, 1884. William de Saxe died in 1899, and she died in 1939 as Catherine Clarissa Black, but there is no Australian record of her second marriage to vaudevillian Elton Black

Mona Donaldson

In February 1915, at the tender age of fourteen, Mona Donaldson started to work for Australasian Films in Sydney as a film examiner. Two years later she moved to Paramount Pictures, first as a film examiner, then as a booking clerk. In 1921 she left that position to look after her ailing mother, but she had enjoyed the work, and when her sister was able to take on the caregiver role, she looked around for further work in the film industry. Because she had experience, she was able to obtain a position as a film cutter in what was then the largest film production enterprise in Sydney—Australasian Films. Already, she was building a reputation, both for competence and for independent spirit. When she found that her new employers were considering her job as temporary, she reminded them that the original advertisement had not stated that. When they suggested that her salary should be the same as it had been at Paramount, she insisted that it was a more responsible position and she deserved a higher salary. She won on both counts (Wright 47; Donaldson)

Elsa Chauvel

Elsa Chauvel had strong opinions about a woman’s role in both work and life. In an interview in 1934, she explained that a woman should charm men and a wife should support her husband (28). Her own life exemplified these principles. She was born Elsie May Wilcox in 1898 in Collingwood, Victoria, Australia. She was the second child and only daughter of itinerant Irish-born actor Edward Wilcox and his wife Ada Maria (née Worrall). When Elsie was about five years old, the Wilcox family moved to South Africa. Edward Wilcox, under the stage name Silveni/Sylvaney, became the actor-manager of a touring theatrical company. From a young age, Elsie’s brother Kyrle performed under the stage name McAllister, and Elsie herself performed under the stage name Sylvaney. They began with juvenile roles, but were soon being made and dressed up to play older characters

Quantum Walk Laser

Synthetic lattices in photonics enable the exploration of light states in new dimensions, transcending phenomena common only to physical space. We propose and demonstrate a Quantum Walk Laser in synthetic frequency space formed by externally modulating a ring-shaped semiconductor laser with ultrafast recovery times. In this device, the initially ballistic quantum walk does not dissipate into low supermode states of the synthetic lattice; instead, thanks to the fast-gain nonlinearity of our quantum cascade laser active material, the state stabilizes in a broad frequency comb, unlocking the full potential of the lattice. This device produces a low-noise, nearly-flat broadband comb (reaching 100 cm$^{-1}$ bandwidth), well predicted by our models. The proposed Quantum Walk Laser offers a promising platform to generate broadband, tunable and stable frequency combs.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figure

The German National Reference Centre for Authentic Food (NRZ-Authent)☆

The present report describes the establishment, structure and objectives of the recently established German National Reference Center for Authentic Food (NRZ-Authent). The NRZ-Authent is completely integrated into the Max Rubner-Institut (MRI), the Federal Research Institute of Nutrition and Food in Germany. Various different departments of MRI have a long experience regarding the analysis of the quality of food in general and the testing of food authenticity in particular. Therefore, a close interaction between these food-related departments and the NRZ-Authent is a basic requirement for the successful work of this newly created centre. The addressees of the NRZ-Authent are the official food authorities and laboratories in the German states. In this context, the NRZ-Authent will establish a platform for providing quick access to updated, reliable and consistent technical data, research findings, new techniques and expertise necessary for the correct application of European Union legislation. The MRI has been working on the authenticity of edible oils for a number of years now, and some examples of this successful work are presented

Active DNA demethylation of developmental cis-regulatory regions predates vertebrate origins

DNA methylation [5-methylcytosine (5mC)] is a repressive gene-regulatory mark required for vertebrate embryogenesis. Genomic 5mC is tightly regulated through the action of DNA methyltransferases, which deposit 5mC, and ten-eleven translocation (TET) enzymes, which participate in its active removal through the formation of 5-hydroxymethylcytosine (5hmC). TET enzymes are essential for mammalian gastrulation and activation of vertebrate developmental enhancers; however, to date, a clear picture of 5hmC function, abundance, and genomic distribution in nonvertebrate lineages is lacking. By using base-resolution 5mC and 5hmC quantification during sea urchin and lancelet embryogenesis, we shed light on the roles of nonvertebrate 5hmC and TET enzymes. We find that these invertebrate deuterostomes use TET enzymes for targeted demethylation of regulatory regions associated with developmental genes and show that the complement of identified 5hmC-regulated genes is conserved to vertebrates. This work demonstrates that active 5mC removal from regulatory regions is a common feature of deuterostome embryogenesis suggestive of an unexpected deep conservation of a major gene-regulatory module

Genetic risk and a primary role for cell-mediated immune mechanisms in multiple sclerosis.

Multiple sclerosis is a common disease of the central nervous system in which the interplay between inflammatory and neurodegenerative processes typically results in intermittent neurological disturbance followed by progressive accumulation of disability. Epidemiological studies have shown that genetic factors are primarily responsible for the substantially increased frequency of the disease seen in the relatives of affected individuals, and systematic attempts to identify linkage in multiplex families have confirmed that variation within the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) exerts the greatest individual effect on risk. Modestly powered genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have enabled more than 20 additional risk loci to be identified and have shown that multiple variants exerting modest individual effects have a key role in disease susceptibility. Most of the genetic architecture underlying susceptibility to the disease remains to be defined and is anticipated to require the analysis of sample sizes that are beyond the numbers currently available to individual research groups. In a collaborative GWAS involving 9,772 cases of European descent collected by 23 research groups working in 15 different countries, we have replicated almost all of the previously suggested associations and identified at least a further 29 novel susceptibility loci. Within the MHC we have refined the identity of the HLA-DRB1 risk alleles and confirmed that variation in the HLA-A gene underlies the independent protective effect attributable to the class I region. Immunologically relevant genes are significantly overrepresented among those mapping close to the identified loci and particularly implicate T-helper-cell differentiation in the pathogenesis of multiple sclerosis

Evolution of the ribbon-like organization of the Golgi apparatus in animal cells

The ‘‘ribbon,’’ a structural arrangement in which Golgi stacks connect to each other, is considered to be restricted to vertebrate cells. Although ribbon disruption is linked to various human pathologies, its functional role in cellular processes remains unclear. In this study, we investigate the evolutionary origin of the Golgi ribbon. We observe a ribbon-like architecture in the cells of several metazoan taxa suggesting its early emergence in animal evolution predating the appearance of vertebrates. Supported by AlphaFold2 modeling, we propose that the evolution of Golgi reassembly and stacking protein (GRASP) binding by golgin tethers may have driven the joining of Golgi stacks resulting in the ribbon-like configuration. Additionally, we find that Golgi ribbon assembly is a shared developmental feature of deuterostomes, implying a role in embryogenesis. Overall, our study points to the functional significance of the Golgi ribbon beyond vertebrates and underscores the need for further investigations to unravel its elusive biological roles