curiosity-free

That was the exclamation written by astronomer Jerry Ehman after receiving a truly unique radio signal from deep space on August 15, 1977. The 72-second-long signal was recorded at Ohio State University's Big Ear radio telescope and for more than a generation, it represented the best available evidence for extraterrestrial life. A Signal in the Noise To most people, the printout of the Wow! signal looks like an incoherent jumble of letters. Really, the only thing that looks special about it is the fact that it's circled in red and someone wrote "Wow!" next to it. The sequence that's circled reads " 6EQUJ5 ," and while you might think we got that number off of E.T.'s license plate, what it represents is the strength of the detected radio signal. See, on the radio signal monitoring tech at Big Ear at the time,  letters stood in for numbers . Numbers 1 through 9 represented themselves, but following 9, the

You jolt awake in the middle of the night, your heart pounding. It takes you a moment to realize that, no, you didn't just rush out for a job interview wearing nothing but a bath towel.  Depending on which dream interpretation dictionary you consult, you might find that your dream reveals anxiety about work, a sense of shame or embarrassment, or perhaps even a deeply repressed inner exhibitionist.  Given all these possibilities, is it true that dreams can reveal our deepest secrets? Dreams can provide useful insights on our lives, but despite what Hollywood or your favorite novel might have you believe, there aren't any studies showing that dreams can lay bare our inner workings.  "There's really no research that supports that point of view," said Deirdre Barrett, a psychologist and dream researcher at Harvard Medical School. Dreams don't contain symbols. No dictionary or dream interpreter can tell you what a dream really "means," she sa

A team of researchers has found an "engine of consciousness" in the  brain  — a region where, in monkeys at least, even a little jump start will make them wake up from anesthesia. Consciousness is a mystery. We don't know for certain why creatures are sometimes awake and sometimes asleep, or which mechanisms in the brain are most important for a conscious state. In this new paper, though, researchers turned up some important clues. Using electrodes across the brains of awake and sleeping macaques, as well as macaques under different forms of  anesthesia , the team found two key pathways in the  monkeys ' brains for consciousness. The researchers also found a specific brain region that seems to get those pathways going, like an engine they could start using some highly specialized jumper cables. That region is known as the central lateral thalamus. But that doesn't mean they've found the seat of consciousness in the brain. "It is unlikely that con

A pair of 99-million-year-old cockroaches are rewriting the early history of the underworld. The ancient roaches, found preserved in amber in Myanmar, are the oldest-known examples of "troglomorphic" organisms — creatures that adapted to the weird, dark environments of caves. And they're the only such dark-adapted creatures known from the  Cretaceous period , having scurried around in the world's shaded crevices even as  Tyrannosaurus rex  walked the  Earth . Nowadays, biologists have  plenty of examples of cockroaches  and of cave-dwelling insects with small eyes and wings, pale bodies, and long arms and antennae. But these specimens, from two distinct, related species, are the oldest animals ever found with those traits. "Caves lack unequivocal fossils before the  Cenozoic ," the researchers wrote in a paper describing their find, referring to a later period after the mass extinction (known as the K/Pg boundary) when dinosaurs died and mammals rose