Seven Alien 'Earths' Found Orbiting Nearby Star

The Earth-size worlds orbit a star just 39 light-years away, and most may have the right conditions to host liquid water on their surfaces.

ILLUSTRATION BY M. KORNMESSER, SPACEENGINE.ORG/ESO

Seven rocky planets orbiting a nearby star may be roughly the size of Earth and could even be right for water—and maybe life—to adorn their surfaces, researchers announced Wednesday.

The planets, which circle a star called TRAPPIST-1 just 39 light-years away, are tucked together so tightly that they routinely spangle each others’ skies, sometimes appearing as shimmering crescents and at other times as orbs nearly twice as large as the full moon.

“The spectacle would be beautiful,” says the University of Cambridge’s Amaury Triaud, coauthor of a study describing the otherworldly heptad that appears in the journal Nature.

The TRAPPIST-1 system is now tied with several others that have seven planets for the greatest number of planets in a stellar system other than our own (which has eight, not counting dwarf planets like Pluto). The system’s existence suggests that Earth-size planets are much more plentiful than previously imagined.

And now, it’s among the best neighborhoods to study for signs of life beyond Earth: The relative sizes of the planets and star, plus the system’s proximity, mean that plucking the signatures of living, breathing organisms from the planet’s atmospheres could be within reach.

Security News This Week: The Latest Netflix Release Is a Personal Security Check-Up

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IT WOULDN’T BE 2017 without regular internet-shaking security bugs fueling our nightmares. The crisis >du jour? a flaw in the internet infrastructure company Cloudflare that caused random data leakage from some of the company’s six million customer sites. Brush your teeth and change your passwords, folks. Meanwhile, researchers have figured out how to steal data by watching a hard drive’s blinking LED indicator. And it’s finally possible to attack an old cryptographic hash function that’s still used for encryption more than it should be.

There was good news this week, too, though. Google offshoot Jigsaw and Google’s Counter Abuse Technology Team publicly released code for anti-harassment toolsthey’ve been honing for more than a year so they can hopefully be implemented around the web. Military bases could use smart city technology to improve their safety and security. And former Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter gave WIRED a glimpse of the future of warfare.

Then again, an arms dealer who sells military tech like tanks, missiles, and weapons told WIRED that doing business in the age of President Trump is a “win-win.” So, there’s that.

If you’re sick of all of this and want to crawl under a digital rock, prominent hacker Kevin Mitnick details how to be invisible online.

But wait, there’s plenty more. Each Saturday we round up the news stories that we didn’t break or cover in depth but that still deserve your attention. As always, click on the headlines to read the full story in each link posted. And stay safe out there.

Running DNA Like a Computer Could Help You Fight Viruses One Day

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DON’T TAKE THIS the wrong way, but you’re just data. Genes built you, from the tips of your toes to the crown of your head. In that sense, you’re not unlike a computer: Code produces the output that is your body.

In fact, for the past two decades, scientists have used actual DNA as if it were literal code, a process called DNA computing, to do things like calculating square roots. Today, researchers report in the journal Nature Communications that they’ve deployed DNA to detect antibodies—soldiers your body produces to fight viruses and such—by running a sequence of molecular instructions. Someday, the same kind of calculations could automatically release drugs in response to infections.

Your Feeble Skills Can’t Handle This Amazing Sports Car

SCUDERIA CAMERON GLICKENHAUS

Think of the world’s fastest cars and a few names come to mind. Ferrari. Lamborghini. Porsche. Glickenhaus.

Glickenwhat?

That would be Jim Glickenhaus. He made an ungodly amount of money in films and finance and has a thing for cars. The kind of thing that leads you to build a bazillion-dollar custom Ferrari because, you know, a Ferrari isn’t extreme enough. So now he’s building cars. Crazy fast supercars. He’s the Glickenhaus in Scuderia Cameron Glickenhaus, an American boutique automaker rolling into the Geneva auto show with the SCG 003S. Yeah, there’s nothing at all graceful about the name, but who cares. Just look at the damn thing.

Now, the supercar game is all about superlatives — most horsepower, highest top speed, that sort of thing. And the Glick aims for the highest honor in this arena: fastest lap at the Nurburgring. The ‘ring is the stuff of legend, a 12.9-mile track so nasty that F1 champion Jackie Stewart dubbed it the Green Hell. It is not for the weak or the stupid, and Glickenhaus wants to lap it in 6 minutes and 30 seconds. That would set a record for a production car.

For those of you who are shrugging, maybe this will get your attention: Scuderia Cameron Glickenhaus claims the 003S will hit 60 from a standstill in less than 3 seconds and top out at 217 mph.

Donald Trump May Have Just Committed an Impeachable Offense

China’s decision to gift the president a valuable trademark this week could violate the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution.

Donald Trump gives a thumbs-up before boarding Marine One on his way to Mar-a-Lago on February 3, 2017.

By Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

Pesident Donald Trump’s first month in office has been dogged by one misstep after another—botched executive orders and attacks on the judiciary, punctuated by bizarre, and often inappropriate, boasting about the size of his electoral victory and inauguration crowd. He has done little to address the cavalcade of scandals that have already become a defining feature of his presidency, from the shadow of intrigue hanging over his campaign’s dealings with Russia to his undiplomatic threats against U.S. allies, derailing any momentum on his inchoate legislative agenda. There’s an inquiry into his ownership of the Trump International Hotel just down Pennsylvania Avenue, a call to discipline his counselor Kellyanne Conway for giving his daughter Ivanka’s brand a “free commercial” on Fox News, and an investigation underway about whether or not there’s enough security in place at Mar-a-Lago after the president decided to review national-security documents on a terrace at the Palm Beach resort last weekend in plain view of prying dinner guests.

Still, there is some good news for Trump and his personal brand, if not for his already embattled administration. According to ABC News, Trump received a big, fat gift from China this week in the form of a 10-year trademark on his name for construction.

The award marks a sudden reversal of fortunes for Trump, who had reportedly been trying to win the valuable rights to his name for a decade. Interestingly, the Chinese government came through for him one month after he took the oath of office and a week after his conversation with Chinese president Xi Jinping during which he endorsed the One China policy. After years of battling to take back the rights to his name from a man named Dong Wei, Trump’s registration was made official on Tuesday and announced by China’s trademark office on Wednesday.