PEAK PERFORMANCE
Billions of Parcels
Anytime, Anywhere
According to the Pitney Bowes Parcel Shipping Index, global parcel volumes are steadily increasing:
Estimated increase of approx. 60% by 2027
Tardigrades
Hidden Champion
They are at most 1.2 millimeters in size – but they are highly adaptable. They can live under water, in Antarctica, in tropical rainforests and even in people’s front gardens. And they can withstand anything. When they dry out, tardigrades freeze. In this state – which they can maintain for more than ten years – almost nothing can harm them. They can withstand temperatures below -200°C or above 100°C, or even radioactive and cosmic radiation. And the best thing is that a mere drop of water is enough to wake up these wonders of nature.
Virtuosos
Exceptional Talent
Born in a railroad car shortly before the outbreak of World War 2, Rudolf Nureyev was raised in great poverty in the provinces and did not receive professional training until late in life. And yet, with virtuoso technique and athletic precision, the ballet dancer became an icon of dance during his lifetime and is considered one of the best dancers of the 20th century.
Go
Surrounded
Go, a game where opponents attempt to surround the most territory, is considered to be one of the most complex strategy games in the world. The number of legal board positions in the 19×19 variant is about 2^10,170 – a number with 171 digits. But even here, AI is keeping up. In October 2015, the AlphaGo program was able to win against multiple-time European champion Fan Hui on the 19×19 board without a handicap. Then in March 2016, the program won four out of five games against Lee Sedol, who is considered one of the world’s best players.
Hard to Crack
Light as plastic, but as strong as steel – these two properties are combined in a new polymer-based material developed by researchers at MIT. Thanks to a structure resembling Lego bricks stuck together, the resulting material is extremely stable. It takes twice the force to break the fabric than it would to shatter steel.
Aircraft: Mars Helicopter “Ingenuity”
Distance from Earth: 400 million km
Atmospheric density: <100 x that of
Total flight distance: 7,407 meters
Maximum altitude: å 14 meters
Total flying time: approx. 1 hour
Mars Exploration
Thin Air
400 million kilometers above the Earth, the small robotic helicopter, which landed on Mars in February 2021, keeps taking off to set new records. Despite extremely adverse conditions. In an atmosphere about 100 times less dense than that of Earth, the aircraft traveled more than 7,400 meters in the air before the end of 2022, reaching an altitude of up to 14 meters.
Veins of Information in the Deep
98 %
of data transmission extends across the sea floor. Even telecommunications depend on this, with around 500 submarine cables connecting the world’s continents.
1850
The first submarine cable ran through the English Channel in 1850. In 1988, the first transatlantic fiber optic cable was laid. It had a transmission capacity of 280 megabits per second.
>1,3 Mio. km
is the estimated total length of the cabling
Today
… modern submarine cables allow 70 million HD videos to be streamed simultaneously.