There used to be water on Mars, we know as much. Just last week, NASA's Phoenix Spacecraft discovered of ice underground. This week, a group of UC Berkeley researchers posited that Mars' atmosphere can be likened to deserts we have here on Earth, and that it even rained in the red planet. How was this possible? Learn more after the jump.

Research conducted by Matthew Walker, a neuroscientist at UC Berkeley found that the emotional centers of brains of sleep-deprived people tend overreact to bad experiences. According to Walker, the sleep-deprived brain basically regresses in terms of control and ends up reverting to more primitive behavior.

Matthew Walker and his team of researchers conducted an experiment involving twenty-six healthy participants. The volunteers were assigned to one of two groups: a group that was allowed to sleep normally, and a sleep-deprived group that was made to stay awake for roughly 35 hours.

One hundred images were flashed to both groups, starting with more emotionally neutral ones, and then more negative images over time. The researchers then scanned the participants' brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) as the volunteers viewed the images. The results? The brains of the sleep-deprived participants were 60% more reactive to the negative images than the brains of the people in the other group.

Walker admitted that more research is needed to determine which components of sleep restore emotional stability. Since psychiatric disorders have been linked to sleep abnormalities, drugs may be used to treat patients once scientists better understand the relationship between sleep and emotional stability. Until they do, it may be a good idea to avoid burning the midnight oil too often.

Yes, we have heard all about the possibility of Mars having bodies of water before, ever since they spotted what resembles to be two shorelines on Mars surface. The idea was debunked when scientists thought that the "shorelines" were too hilly to be considered as ocean beds.

However, they have discovered something that would explain how the shorelines came about: Mars' unstable spin.

And how would an unstable spin explain the bumpy surface? Even heavenly bodies obey the Laws of Physics, so when a planet spins, the heaviest things - which includes vast bodies of water - shift toward the center, or in this case the equator.

More than a billion years ago, something happened in the way mass was distributed on Mars that caused the Martian ocean beds to change shape and warp. Taylor Perron of UC Berkeley is excited about this discovery. "We found evidence of the path the shift would have to have occurred, and it matches with the deformation of the shorelines," he said.

The surface of the planet near the equator is in a flattened bulge as a result of pressure brought about by centripetal forces, but the surface beyond the equator becomes deformed, with hilly elevations of rock as they get pushed towards the north.

The rock deformation, which behaves in a predictable manner, turns out to be the key that helped Perron and the rest of the planetary research team find the ocean shorelines.

"This really confirms that there was an ocean on Mars," said Mark Richards, a planetary scientist at the University of California at Berkeley and co-author of the study, which is detailed in the June 14 issue of the journal "Nature".

A study conducted at the Berkeley and Davis campuses of the University of California has revealed that it is possible to render free-floating HIV in breast milk inactive by flash-heating the milk.

Studies by the research team have shown that flash-heating breast milk can kill bacteria while retaining most of the milk's nutritional and antimicrobial properties, as well as most of the milk's important antibodies.

What's noteworthy about the discovery is that the process - heating a glass jar of expressed breast milk in a pan of water over a flame or single burner - can be easily done, even by people who belong in resource-poor communities.

Research into this process began when HIV-positive women in Zimbabwe asked how they could make their milk safe for their babies. Barbara Abrams, UC Berkeley professor of epidemiology and maternal and child health and senior author on the study, notes:

We wanted to be sure that there was scientific evidence that flash-heated milk was truly free of HIV, nutritious and immunologically beneficial. This study was done in response to the concerns of the mothers in Zimbabwe, and in addition provides evidence that field studies are warranted.

The findings are set to appear in the July 1 issue of the "Journal of the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes". If you're curious about it, it is now available online. You can head to it via our read link below.

 

There's strength in numbers. This bit of wisdom has been proven time and again by bees and ants - those social animals that pack a lot of punch in crowds of themselves, albeit being tiny as individuals. At the University of California in Berkeley, electrical engineers bank on this idea by making flea-bots that could make an impact in swarms.

The collective term for the swarm of flea-bots is Smart Dust. It's supposed to be composed of flea-sized two-legged robots that could jump up to 30 times their size. Such groups of miniscule bots could be used to look for survivors in a rubble after an earthquake, or create networks of distributed sensors for detecting chemical substances, for example.

A team of electrical engineers at UC Berkeley are hard at work in pursuit of their Smart Dust dream. Former grad student Sarah Bergbreiter leads the way in developing autonomous robots fabricated by the same technology used to make integrated circuits. Currently, the prototypes are these solar-powered microbots 8.5 mm long and less than 4 mm wide. MEMS (micro-electromechanical systems) is the key to the microbots' locomotion.

To put it simply, the microbots move through a method similar to the way a person climbs a ladder, repeatedly engaging a shuttle that pulls a flea leg forward and then engages it again to move it a bit more. There are plans of making the microbots smaller and integrating wings on them, but these will come later.

We've always thought of robots as big, lumbering machines. It's a novel idea to come up with a group of tiny robots that could still function after one of them fails.

Personally, I love going to school. That may sound a bit dorky, but I must admit that I enjoyed every minute I spent studying my lessons, doing my thesis, and mingling with friends. It was fun...but expensive. We must face the reality that not everybody could afford to go to college and pay the hefty tuition.

UC Berkeley knows that and last April, they announced a plan to place complete and free academic courses on iTunes. And now, they have 59 full courses available as podcasts. Now that's amazing.Not only would you be able to learn new things for free, you could also design your own curriculum.

If you hate math and love the social sciences, you could always mix up Berkeley's social sciences and humanities podcasts. If you aren't a big fan of studying society and you feel at ease with crunching numbers and solving formulas, you could always listen to the hard sciences podcasts. And for the aspiring game developers, you could always learn a thing or two from their Computer Science and Engineering podcasts.

Interested? You could check out UC Berkeley iTunes courses through our read link below. Let the learning begin!

It's called "art" today, but once upon a time, music was actually considered a branch of science and mathematics. However you look at it, music contains strong elements of art and physics. Scientists are using one of the scientific principles of music to advance the study of matter at the quantum level. However, don't plan on hearing this music anytime soon - its vibrations are way beyond the range of human hearing.

Alex Zettl, a physicist at UC Berkeley, has created what amounts to a nanoscale "guitar" with strings consisting of carbon nanotubes. The "strings," which are described as "tiny bridges," resonate at 1.3 gigahertz - 1.3 billion cycles per second. "Other groups have made resonators that were very small, and have gotten into the one gigahertz regime, but only at very low temperatures and pressures," Zettl said. "So getting these very high frequencies under room temperature and atmospheric pressure is a real breakthrough." The use of carbon for the "strings" allows them to be stiff, yet have a low mass - making them excellent high-frequency oscillators.

Because of their high sensitivity, these carbon nano-strings can be used to measure matter at the molecular level. Placing matter on these "strings" cause measurable slowing in their rate of vibration - much the same way as placing a finger on a guitar string changes its pitch. "Biological molecules, threat molecules – the sort of things airport screeners are interested in – have masses in this range. We’d like to push it to where you can measure individual atoms, but in everyday life the most interesting things are molecules," added Zettl.

Like so many things in the cosmos, some stars practically die a-borning. These "failed stars" are known as "brown dwarfs," and are simply not large enough to sustain a long-term hydrogen fusion reaction.

Before now, scientists believed the minimum mass required to sustain a long-term hydrogen reaction is equal to that of 75 times that of Jupiter. Although Jupiter's chemical makeup is almost identical to that of a star, it's mass is far too small to even begin a hydrogen reaction. As far as brown dwarfs are concerned, it has been difficult to confirm theories because brown dwarfs look a lot like red dwarfs - which are able to sustain the reaction required for full "starhood."

Harvey Richer of the University of British Columbia has used Hubble to observe the faintest red dwarf stars yet observed. These are located in a very old cluster identified as NGC 6397, about 8500 light years away. At 13.5 billion years, this cluster dates back to the beginning of the universe. According to another team member, Jay Anderson of Rice University in Texas, "...the brown dwarfs have by now faded off into obscurity so there is a very stark contrast between the stars that could burn hydrogen and the ones that couldn't."

Theories predict that the low-end mass for true stars should be determined by how many metals are present.  Stellar objects with a metal content similar our own sun would need a minimum mass no less than 7.5% that of Sol. The NGC 6397 cluster has a metallic content that is less than 1% of the Sun's, so this dividing line is expected to be slightly greater - 8.3% that of Sol, or 83 times the mass of Jupiter.

The new Hubble observations are able to identify starts 10 to 20 times fainter than earlier ones. "This kind of observation is probably the best kind of constraint one can get," says Gibor Basri of UC Berkeley. He added that the hydrogen burning limits observed so far are in line with current theory.

While studying the remnants of a supernova in the "nearby" Small Magellanic Cloud, a team of scientists at UC Berkeley made an odd discovery: the amount of interstellar dust was only a small fraction of what it should have been.

Supernovae - exploding stars - have long been thought to be the source of most of the interstellar dust in the universe. New observations with the latest equipment is showing this may not necessarily be true. As astrophysicist Snezana Stanimirovic notes, "observations of supernova remnants in the Milky Way show much less dust than expected."

What gives?

According to studies by Ben Sugerman of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore,  it may be the result of some mistaken assumptions. Earlier scientists had assumed that supernova dust spreads uniformly, "like a big, spherical, hot bubble." The reality is that the dust may actually spread in a fashion that is "very clumpy." Doug Welch of McMaster University also points out that supernova dust quickly cools in outer space - and cold dust is not observable by infrared telescopes. This fact may account for the "apparent dust deficit" in earlier observations.

However, Stanimirovic points out that "a lot of dust grains get destroyed as the blast wave propagates." Dust grains grind against each until they're small to detect.