Australian workers mobilised precociously to win the eight-hour day. Building workers in Melbourne secured the standard in 1856. They inspired and helped to lead a wider movement that shared in the victory over subsequent decades. By the early 1890s the “eight-hour day” was widely embraced as a social norm. Australian successes were contemplated in a range of international publications.

Australian employees in several trades secured an eight-hour day from the middle 1850s. By the 1890s, Australian advances had attracted considerable international attention. But these precocious Australian successes have not yet been satisfactorily explained. The dominant explanations focus especially on a propitious environment in the middle 1850s, buoyed by the wealth of a gold rush and characterised by labour shortages. These accounts overestimate the persistence of favourable market conditions and underestimate the import of the political context and of creative and determined collective struggle.

This article offers a new interpretation. It suggests that the Australian campaign for eight-hours is best understood as a social movement. It then applies five key concepts drawn from the field of social-movement studies to examine the campaign and to explain its successes: political opportunities; framing; strategy; repertoire; and mobilising structures.

The article aims not only to explain the Australian eight-hours campaign, but also to demonstrate the value of concepts and approaches drawn from “social-movement studies” to the study of labour history. It is based on a substantial source base, including union records, scores of newspapers, parliamentary debates, contemporary pamphlets, and government reports.

We pose some conjectures about the existence of certain complete, one-dimensional families of degree $d$, genus $g$ branched covers of an elliptic curve. The conjectures would imply that the slope of the corresponding Hurwitz space is precisely $5+6/d$, and that the slope of the moduli space of stable genus $g$ curves is bounded below by $5$. We provide evidence for the conjectures when $g=2$ or when $d \leq 5$ and $g \gg 0$.

Flax plays an important role in art, especially for painters. Flax seeds are ground into linseed oil, which is used as binder for oil paints, and fibers are used to make linen canvas as a support for paintings. Because of the rapid growth of flax, linen canvas fiber and linseed oil are considered good candidates for the radiocarbon (14C) dating of paintings. However, the time necessary to transform flax into a linen canvas must be estimated in order to determine the completion date of paintings. Based on the paintings of the French painter Pierre Soulages (1919–2022), who titled his works with the day on which he considered them finished, the time elapsed between completion of the painting and harvesting of the flax was determined for 25 canvases and 13 oil binders. For the canvases, three periods can be distinguished between 1956 and 1981 with durations of 5±1 years in the 1950s, 3±2 years in the 1960s and 11±3 years for the paintings from the 1970s–1980s. For the oil, the time elapsed between the date indicated by the artist and the 14C calibrated date has a mean value of 3±2 years in the 1950s and 1960s and more than 15 years in the 1970s. These long time lags could be due to the massive change in flax processing, which was relocated, resulting in longer times between flax harvesting and canvas marketing. The determination of these time lags enables us to better interpret the 14C dating results for the paintings.

The Cahn–Hilliard model with reaction terms can lead to situations in which no coarsening is taking place and, in contrast, growth and division of droplets occur which all do not grow larger than a certain size. This phenomenon has been suggested as a model for protocells, and a model based on the modified Cahn–Hilliard equation has been formulated. We introduce this equation and show the existence and uniqueness of solutions. Then, formally matched asymptotic expansions are used to identify a sharp interface limit using a scaling of the reaction term, which becomes singular when the interfacial thickness tends to zero. We compute planar solutions and study their stability under non-planar perturbations. Numerical computations for the suggested model are used to validate the sharp interface asymptotics. In addition, the numerical simulations show that the reaction terms lead to diverse phenomena such as growth and division of droplets in the obtained solutions, as well as the formation of shell-like structures.

To date, the direct effects of complete glacier disappearance on the specialized fauna associated with this habitat have never been investigated in situ. The Trobio glacier, once the largest in the Bergamo Alps (Italy), completely vanished in 2023 due to climate-induced retreat. This study reconstructs Trobio glacier’s evolution from the Little Ice Age to its disappearance and assesses the impact of glacier extinction on two cryophilic endemic terrestrial arthropod species: the ground beetle Nebria tresignore and the springtail Desoria orobica. Historical maps, literature and recent field data were used to trace glacier changes, while biological surveys evaluated species occurrence to be compared with past (last 10 years) records. These data reveal a direct link between the recorded glacier retreat and species elevational shift: Nebria tresignore shifted upslope about 30 m a-1 following glacial retreat. Desoria orobica showed a dramatic population collapse, with average densities dropping from 80 to < 4 individuals per sample since 2020, likely due to the deeply modified glacial environment. These findings highlight the vulnerability of glacier-dependent biodiversity and the urgent need to document glacier extinction and to identify and protect microrefugia for cold-adapted species in rapidly changing alpine environments.

We present a comprehensive spectro-temporal analysis of GRS $1915+105$ observed with AstroSat during June, 2017. A detailed study of the temporal properties reveals the appearance of an ‘unknown’ variability class ($\tau$) during $\unicode{x03C1} \rightarrow \unicode{x03BA}$ class transition of the source. This new ‘unknown’ class ($\tau$) is characterised by the irregular repetition of low count ‘dips’ along with the adjacent ‘flare’ like features in between two successive steady count rate durations, resulting in uniform ‘C’ shaped distribution in the colour-colour diagram. A detailed comparative study of the variability properties between the $\tau$ class and other known variability classes of GRS $1915+105$ indicates it as a distinct variability class of the source. Further, we find evidence of the presence of possible HFQPO features at ${\sim} 71$ Hz with quality factor ${\sim} 13$, rms amplitude ${\sim} 4.69\%$, and significance $3\sigma$, respectively. In addition, a harmonic-like feature at ${\sim} 152$ Hz is also seen with quality factor ${\sim} 21$, rms amplitude ${\sim} 5.75\%$, and significance ${\sim} 4.7\sigma$. The energy-dependent power spectral study reveals that the fundamental HFQPO and its harmonic are present in 3–15 keV and 3–6 keV energy ranges, respectively. Moreover, the wide-band (0.7–50 keV) spectral modelling comprising of thermal Comptonization component indicates the presence of a cool ($kT_\textrm{e}\sim 1.7$ keV) and optically thick (optical depth ${\sim} 14$) Comptonizing ‘corona’, which seems to be responsible in regulating the HFQPO features in GRS 1915+105. Finally, we find the bolometric luminosity ($L_\textrm{bol}$) to be about $42\% L_\textrm{Edd}$ within 1–100 keV, indicating the sub-Eddington accretion regime of the source.

Do employment opportunities for women reduce intimate partner violence (IPV)? We address this question using harmonized field experiments in Egypt and Tunisia. In Egypt, we evaluate a public works program that disproportionately benefited women; in Tunisia, the program we evaluate benefited men and women equally. Consistent with a household bargaining model in which men perpetrate IPV to maintain dominance over their spouses, we find that the Egyptian program exacerbated IPV and heightened psychological distress, even among eligible women who were not randomly selected to participate, while the Tunisian program did not. Also consistent with this model, the Egyptian program increased women’s control over spending – a measure of bargaining power – while the Tunisian program did not. We rule out several alternative explanations for these results. Finally, we show that the Egyptian program’s adverse effects on IPV persisted over time, but did not spill over onto women in the community writ large.

We define and study a generalization of the Beilinson–Drinfeld Grassmannian to the case where the curve is replaced by a smooth projective surface $X$, and the trivialization data are given on loci associated with a nonlinear flag of closed subschemes. We first establish some general formal gluing results for moduli of (almost) perfect complexes and torsors. We construct a simplicial object $\operatorname {\underline {\mathsf{Fl}}}_X$ of flags of closed subschemes of a smooth projective surface $X$, associated with the operation of taking union of flags. We prove that this simplicial object has the $2$-Segal property. For an affine complex algebraic group $G$, we define a derived, flag analogue $\mathcal{G}r_X$ of the Beilinson–Drinfeld Grassmannian of $G$-bundles on the surface $X$, and show that most of the properties of the Beilinson–Drinfeld Grassmannian for curves can be extended to our flag generalization: we prove a factorization formula, the existence of a canonical flat connection and define a chiral product on suitable sheaves on $\operatorname {\underline {\mathsf{Fl}}}_X$ and on $\mathcal{G}r_X$. We sketch the construction of actions of flags analogues of the loop group and of the positive loop group on $\mathcal{G}r_X$. To fixed ‘large’ flags on $X$, we associate ‘exotic’ derived structures on the stack of $G$-bundles on $X$.

Methylation alterations of the glucocorticoid receptor gene (NR3C1) may help explain why not all individuals experiencing insensitive parenting develop behavior problems, yet evidence from human cohorts remains limited. This longitudinal study examined associations among NR3C1 methylation, caregiver parenting, and child internalizing and externalizing behaviors. A total of 224 Han Chinese preschoolers (Mage = 47.33 ± 9.60 months; 42.5% girls) were recruited from Jinan, China, in 2021 (T1). Parenting quality and child behavior problems were reported by both parents, and NR3C1 methylation across 46 cytosine–phosphate–guanine sites in the exon 1F promoter region was sequenced from buccal cells. Follow-up assessments were conducted 1.5 years later among 113 children who stayed in the same kindergarten (Mage = 63.60 ± 7.68 months; 45.7% girls). NR3C1 methylation at baseline moderated the association between parenting and baseline, but not follow-up, behavior problems, consistent with differential susceptibility. Children with lower methylation exhibited more behavior problems under low-quality parenting but fewer under high-quality parenting. This interaction did not vary between parental and child sex, or NR3C1 BclI (rs41423247) and Tth111I (rs10052957) polymorphisms. Findings highlight the dynamic nature of Epigenome × Environment interactions and suggest that lower NR3C1 methylation may act as a plasticity factor in preschool children.