Ground Zero

Stoking Ground Zero health worries

Following the attack of September 11th, public opinion polls showed a remarkable leap in Americans’ trust of their government. Some in New York City seem to be carving out an exception to that trust when it comes to the US Environmental Protection Agency. Fanned by some alarming news reports, there are doubts about whether the EPA has been telling the truth about the New York City air. In the w...

The origins of AIDS: from patient zero to ground zero.

The HIV/AIDS pandemic has so far caused about 35 million deaths, while 34 million individuals currently live with HIV. 2 Even if this will have no impact on the course of the epidemic, understanding the factors that allowed the successful emergence of HIV-1 is important, first as a moral obligation towards the victims, but also to draw lessons that could ultimately help mankind avoid facing sim...

A Theoretical Study of Solidarity in American Society: The Case of the “Ground Zero Mosque” Controversy

The paper uses the case study of the controversy regarding the construction of a mosque near the site of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in Manhattan, New York, to analyze the different theoretical approaches to the concept of solidarity. It is argued that the presence of affectional solidarity which is based on feelings of caring, friendship and love was very limited in the case under study. Instea...

On Zero–Mass Ground States in Super– Membrane Matrix Models

We recall a formulation of super-membrane theory in terms of certain matrix models. These models are known to have a mass spectrum given by the positive half-axis. We show that, for the simplest such matrix model, a normalizable zero-mass ground state does not exist. Heisenberg Fellow On leave of absence from Karlsruhe University

South Africa ground zero for reforming drug patents.