Based on an idea from a University of California, Berkeley, student, Roland Saekow, 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