TRAPPIST-1 is a star that’s 39 light years away from us. The journal Nature reports that it has seven warm, Earthlike planets orbiting it. From Washington Post : The discovery, reported Wednesday in the journal Nature, represents the first time astronomers have ever detected so many terrestrial planets orbiting a single star. Researchers say the system is an ideal laboratory for studying alien worlds and could be the best place in the galaxy to search for life beyond Earth. “Before this, if you wanted to study terrestrial planets, we had only four of them and they were all in our solar system,” said lead author Michaël Gillon, an exoplanet researcher at the University of Liège in Belgium. “Now we have seven Earth-sized planets to expand our understanding. Yes, we have the possibility to find water and life. But even if we don’t, whatever we find will be super interesting.” Images: NASA/JPL-Caltech

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Nearby star has 7 "Earthlike" planets

In Eastern Europe, organized crime and the government are the same thing, so the US is having a tough time stopping the ransomware attacks emanating from those countries. The LA Times has a story about a recent attack on a community college in Los Angeles: Phil Lieberman, a cybersecurity expert, said attacks such as the one at Los Angeles Valley College are common among companies and government agencies that use the Internet. “The attacks generally come out of Eastern Europe and cannot be stopped because the United States does not have pacts with the countries where the attacks are launched,” he said. Ransomware is usually delivered via email or through an infected website and immediately locks a computer system, Lieberman said. After a payment is received, hackers provide an “unlock code.” Finding the hackers isn’t the hard part, he said. The problem, according to Lieberman, is that “the U.S. government has no way to stop them, since the governments of the countries that launch this are uncooperative and in fact benefit from the criminal activity going on within their borders.” Here are 27 screenshots of ransomware . Most of them look like computer screens from bad 1990s hacker movies.

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Los Angeles Valley College pays $28,000 in bitcoin ransom to hackers

m0nster0 posted this 3mm-thick slice of a Seymchan pallasite meteorite to Reddit. He says its “one of my favorite bits of space rock.” I can’t argue with that! He bought it on eBay from this guy , who sells some stunning specimens.

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Beautiful Seymchan pallasite meteorite