San Jose/Santa Clara Water Pollution Control Plant

The San Jose/Santa Clara Water Pollution Control Plant is one of the largest advanced wastewater treatment facilities in California. It treats and cleans the wastewater of over 1,500,000 people that live and work in the 300-square mile area encompassing San Jose, Santa Clara, Milpitas, Campbell, Cupertino, Los Gatos, Saratoga, and Monte Sereno.The Water Pollution Control Plant has the capacity to treat 167,000,000 gallons of wastewater per day. It is located in Alviso, at the southernmost tip of the San Francisco Bay. Originally constructed in 1956, the Plant had the capacity to treat 36,000,000 gallons of water per day and only provided primary treatment. In 1964, the Plant added a secondary treatment process to its system. In 1979, the Plant upgraded its wastewater treatment process to an advanced, tertiary system.

Graphic illustrating sources of wastewater that flow into the San Jose/Santa Clara Water Pollution Control Plant.Wastewater from sinks, toilets, and drains inside homes, businesses and schools in most of Santa Clara Valley travels through an underground pipe system, known as the sanitary sewer system, before it arrives for treatment at the San Jose/Santa Clara Water Pollution Control Plant. That journey can take up to 10 hours. About 18 hours later, 99% of the impurities have been removed through a highly sophisticated treatment process that simulates the way nature purifies water, but at a greatly accelerated rate.

Acquired brain injury

A neurological condition, Acquired Brain Injury (ABI) is damage to the brain acquired after birth. It usually affects cognitive, physical, emotional, social or independent functioning and can result from traumatic brain injury (i.e. accidents, falls, assaults, etc.) and nontraumatic brain injury (i.e. stroke, brain tumours, infection, poisoning, hypoxia, ischemia or substance abuse). Most definitions of ABI exclude neurodegenerative disorders. Acquired brain injury is not to be confused with intellectual disability. People with a brain injury may have difficulty controlling, coordinating and communicating their thoughts and actions but they usually retain their intellectual abilities. Brain injury has dramatically varied effects and no two people can expect the same outcome or resulting difficulties. The brain controls every part of human life: physically, intellectually, behaviorally, socially and emotionally. When the brain is damaged, some other part of a person's life will also be adversely affected. Even a mild injury can sometimes result in a serious disability that will interfere with a person’s daily functioning and personal activities for the rest of their life. While the outcome of the injury depends largely on the nature and severity of the injury itself, appropriate treatment will play a vital role in determining the level of recovery.

Sudbury Basin

The Sudbury Basin, also known as Sudbury Structure or the Sudbury Nickel Irruptive, is the second largest known impact crater or astrobleme on Earth, and a major geologic structure in Ontario, Canada.

The basin is located on the Canadian Shield in the city of Greater Sudbury, Ontario. The former municipalities of Rayside-Balfour and Valley East lie within the Sudbury Basin, which is referred to locally as "The Valley". The urban core of the former city of Sudbury lies on the southern outskirts of the Basin.

The Sudbury Basin is located near a number of other geological structures, including the Temagami Magnetic Anomaly, the Lake Wanapitei impact crater and the western end of the Ottawa-Bonnechere Graben, although none of the structures are directly related to each other in the sense of resulting from the same geophysical processes.

Visual modularity

In cognitive neuroscience, visual modularity is an organizational concept concerning how vision works. The way in which the primate visual system operates is currently under intense scientific scrutiny. One dominant thesis is that different properties of the visual world (colour, motion, form and so forth) require different computational solutions which are implemented in anatomically/functionally distinct regions that operate independently – that is, in a modular fashion (Calabretta & Parisi, 2005).