"Climate Change Implications of Waste Treatment"
Abstract: The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has estimated that four percent of the equivalent anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions in the world result from methane and nitrous oxide produced from wastewater, solid wastes, and animal manure. However, if such methane gas is collected and used as a biofuel, not only would the methane emissions decrease, but also the need for fossil fuels could be decreased as well. Indeed, the potential to produce methane from wastewater treatment might be exploited to a greater extent than it has at present to turn a potential problem into a significant benefit for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. How might wastes best be handled in the future to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and how might this change our current practices? These questions will be explored in this seminar.
Based on an idea from a University of California, Berkeley, student, ChronoZoom - a zoomable timeline of timelines augmented with multimedia features -- is coming to life. UC Berkeley geology professor Walter Alvarez and his students have teamed up with Microsoft Research Connections engineers to make this web-based
software possible. ChronoZoom is being designed to help visualize history and to assist researchers in viewing large amounts of data to find new historical connections.
A beta version of ChronoZoom was released today (Wednesday, March 1, 2012) by Outercurve Foundation, a non-profit organization that supports open-source software.
The idea arose in a UC Berkeley course about Big History taught by Alvarez, who first proposed that a comet or asteroid smashed into the Earth 65 million years ago and killed off the dinosaurs. Big History is a unified, interdisciplinary way of looking at and teaching the history of the cosmos, Earth, life and humanity: the history of everything.
For full story: http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2012/03/14/chronozoom-a-deep-dive-into-the-history-of-everything