Isar Aerospace, a spin-off of the Technical University of Munich (TUM), has conducted the first test flight of its rocket - and thus also the first launch of a carrier rocket designed to transport loads into orbit from Western Europe. In future, the system will be used to launch small and medium-sized satellites into space, which are crucial for numerous emerging technologies. The founding of the start-up by three graduates was intensively supported at TUM.

Heart disease remains the leading cause of death in the United States, accounting for one in five deaths. The inability of damaged heart muscle tissue to regenerate makes heart disease difficult to treat, and end-stage heart failure patients have no choice but to join a long list of people waiting for a heart transplant. Researchers from Emory University are working to provide another option for such patients. To do this, the team took their research to a laboratory unlike any on Earth—the International Space Station (ISSInternational Space Station).

The computational capacity of life may be far greater than previously estimated, according to Philip Kurian. Because all physical systems process information, including the universe and all the organisms in it, they can be considered to perform computations. Previous estimates of the computational capacity of life on Earth have focused on the central processing unit of a neuron, which would exclude life without neurons. Kurian now recalculates this capacity, raising it by a factor of 10²⁰, based in part on his research team’s work to show that polymers contain small-molecule quantum emitters that should be treated as quantum processors. The emitters are found across all eukaryotic life and some bacterial species. Kurian suggests that the number of elementary logical operations that may have been performed by the universe is “approximately the square of the number of operations that can have been performed by all kingdoms of life on Earth in the entire existence of our planet.” The findings could help to gauge the future performance of quantum computing, but Kurian says they also raise the question: “If life and the universe are performing sophisticated computations, what exactly are the functions and purposes of their computing?”