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Adding to the ongoing reports of mystery sounds being heard around the world, the city of Alhambra, California, has been plagued by the sounds of mysterious explosions since February of this year. To date, emergency services have received 114 reports regarding the phenomenon, where witnesses report hearing a loud explosion, strong enough to rattle windows, but no resulting flash, smoke or fire can be seen: “No one has seen the cause of the booms, smelled it or found remnants of fireworks,” according to Alhambra City Manager Mark Yokoyama, “and the calls we get don’t have enough specificity for us to find the source.”
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One of medical science’s indispensable diagnostic and research tools over the past quarter-century has been functional magnetic resonance imaging technology, or fMRI. This is a non-invasive imaging technique that makes use of strong magnetic fields and radio waves to produce three-dimensional images of the interior of the human body, and has revolutionized research into brain activity, using increased blood flow to indicate corresponding increases in neural activity. However, a new study has called the accuracy of the device’s software into question, after discovering a bug in commonly-used MRI interpretation software packages — a bug that may very well call the results of over 40,000 medical research studies into question.
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In another first for modern astronomy, astronomers at the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile have produced what may the first direct photograph of an exoplanet that is orbiting a star that has another previously-known planet that was found using the proven "transit method". The transit method is where the planet’s presence is detected by the dimming of the parent star as the planet transits between the star and Earth.

"If it is confirmed that CVSO 30c orbits CVSO 30, this would be the first star system to host both a close-in exoplanet detected by the transit method and a far-out exoplanet detected by direct imaging," according to the ESO release article.
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It’s sometimes easy to forget that as humans, we’re not the only technologically-capable species present on Earth at the moment: many of our animal brethren make and use tools to shape their immediate environment, such as birds building nests as structures to raise their young in, beavers building dams to flood areas for security from predators, prairie dogs possessing a language that contains a vocabulary of hundreds of words, and chimpanzees shaping sticks to dig and hunt for ants.
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