The PHENIX Experiment at RHIC

The physics emphases of the PHENIX collaboration and the design and current status of the PHENIX detector are discussed. The plan of the collaboration for making the most effective use of the available luminosity in the first years of RHIC operation is also presented.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure. Further details of the PHENIX physics program available at http://www.rhic.bnl.gov/phenix

A novel conceptual framework for examining environmental behaviour in large organisations: a case study of the Cornwall National Health Service (NHS) in the UK

This article is concerned with the development of a conceptual framework of the key antecedents that lead to sustainable environmental behavior amongst employees within a large organizational setting. A range of quantitative and qualitative methods was employed in the study to examine behavior. Using the Cornwall National Health Service (NHS) in the United Kingdom as a case study, the research demonstrated that both organizational and individual/cognitive factors served as key predictors for sustainable waste behavior. However, these factors did not work in isolation but rather, within a dynamic, holistic, intrarelated, and interrelated conceptual framework to ultimately determine individual behavior. The results suggest the need to address both categories of variables when developing policies to achieve greater sustainability in the behavior of employees within large organization

Polymorphisms of large effect explain the majority of the host genetic contribution to variation of HIV-1 virus load

Previous genome-wide association studies (GWAS) of HIV-1–infected populations have been underpowered to detect common variants with moderate impact on disease outcome and have not assessed the phenotypic variance explained by genome-wide additive effects. By combining the majority of available genome-wide genotyping data in HIV-infected populations, we tested for association between ∼8 million variants and viral load (HIV RNA copies per milliliter of plasma) in 6,315 individuals of European ancestry. The strongest signal of association was observed in the HLA class I region that was fully explained by independent effects mapping to five variable amino acid positions in the peptide binding grooves of the HLA-B and HLA-A proteins. We observed a second genome-wide significant association signal in the chemokine (C-C motif) receptor (CCR) gene cluster on chromosome 3. Conditional analysis showed that this signal could not be fully attributed to the known protective CCR5Δ32 allele and the risk P1 haplotype, suggesting further causal variants in this region. Heritability analysis demonstrated that common human genetic variation—mostly in the HLA and CCR5 regions—explains 25% of the variability in viral load. This study suggests that analyses in non-European populations and of variant classes not assessed by GWAS should be priorities for the field going forward