Author: DW

Countless clips of heroic dogs rescuing humans are circulating on social media. But do dogs really have a magical sixth sense, or are their “superpowers” simply biology that’s being given outsized significance by their human owners? Spectacularly staged rescue videos get millions of clicks on social media, whether they are real scenes, cleverly edited clips or AI illusions.  Psychologically, this is confirmation bias at work. People remember conspicuous dog behavior before an accident but forget all the times the dog reacted similarly without incident. The desire to believe in a special bond with one’s own pet and its unique abilities makes belief…

For Greg Steinmetz, the Augsburg, Germany-born Jakob Fugger was “the first person to conduct trade on a truly global scale.” Steinmetz, a former correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, profiled Fugger in the 2015 biography The Richest Man Who Ever Lived. Jakob Fugger was the first merchant to conduct his trade on a global scaleImage: gemeinfrei/Narziss Renner/Wikipedia Speaking with DW, Steinmetz said global commerce barely existed at the time, until German Emperor Charles V extended European control into South America during his reign as Holy Roman emperor and king of Spain in the 16th century. There wasn’t much of a globe to…

Do you enjoy solving puzzles? What would you do if given a foreign code to decipher but no guide to grammar and no dictionary? That is exactly the problem faced by archeologists and linguists with regard to a number of ancient writing systems that remain a mystery to this day, despite technological advances. They tell of advanced civilizations whose writing we cannot understand.   Svenja Bonmann is a specialist in historical-comparative linguistics at the University of Cologne in western Germany. Her research involves trying to decipher ancient languages and reconstruct their structures. “I find it very appealing to be faced with an intellectual…

Lionel Messi’s visit to India, called “The GOAT Tour,” is just the latest promotional solo jaunt by a sports star in 2025. It didn’t go entirely to plan, with fans storming the pitch in Kolkata, but the number in attendance was proof that interest in sports stars remains sky-high.  Earlier in the year, NBA stars LeBron James and Steph Curry were in China on solo tours, with James’s trip done with main sponsor Nike and labeled “The Forever King Tour.” Brands in sports are not new. Fred Perry clothing was created by the British tennis player in the 1950s. Air Jordan entered the picture with basketball…

December 1914. World War I had been raging for five months. Between minefields and barbed-wire fences, millions of soldiers faced each other in trenches along the Western Front, sometimes only some 30 meters apart. The combat zone stretched from the English Channel through Belgium and France to the Swiss border. As the war dragged on, soldiers huddled in their dugouts, where rats, lice, the cold and poor food wore them down, and death hung over them. Beyond the trenches, between the enemy lines, lay the muddy hell of no man’s land, where the bodies of fallen comrades lay out of reach. Disillusionment…

The long-running legal fight over Bayer’s weedkiller Roundup has seen nearly 200,000 cancer claims filed in US courts over the past seven years and is now being turned into a political tug of war. In prior Roundup lawsuits, the US Justice Department under former President Joe Biden, had argued that consumers should be allowed to pursue damages against Germany’s chemical giant, with most claims involving non‑Hodgkin lymphoma after long-term exposure to the pesticide. Earlier this month, however, President Donald Trump’s administration reversed course. After the US Supreme Court sought the Solicitor General’s view, the Justice Department sided with Bayer and urged limits on the tens…

For a number of countries that missed out on the 2026 World Cup, the 2025 Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON) which kicks off on December 21 in Morocco, not only offers a swift chance at a measure of redemption but also a chance to start rebuilding and preparing for the global tournament when it next comes around in 2030.  Teams such as Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Zimbabwe, Benin, Sudan and others will stay home next summer, even though Africa saw its allocation at next summer’s World Cup expand to nine automatic places, up from five in 2022. They will, however, all be in…

When do the festivities begin? For Catholics, the Advent season started on November 30 this year — and with it, the excitement for Christmas. At the Vatican, the festivities begin with the official lighting of the Christmas tree and the inauguration of the Nativity scene in St. Peter’s Square, which both took place on December 15 this year.  What kind of Christmas tree has been erected at the Vatican? Every year, a different Roman Catholic diocese has the honor of donating a Christmas tree to the Vatican. This year’s tree is a Norway spruce from the diocese of Bolzano-Bressanone in…

In mid-December, Evelyn Palla, the newly appointed chief executive of Deutsche Bahn (DB), unveiled a sweeping restructuring plan for Germany’s state-owned rail operator, set to take effect in 2026. After receiving approval from DB’s supervisory board on December 10, Palla said the company would eliminate around 30% of its executive positions as part of an effort to streamline management, decentralize decision-making, and improve punctuality and efficiency by making the organization more agile. The overhaul comes at a low point for Deutsche Bahn’s performance. This autumn, punctuality fell to a new record low, with just 55% of long-distance trains arriving less than six…

Even in Paris’s hard-drinking intellectual circles, French philosopher and feminist icon Simone de Beauvoir found that a glass of wine hit harder than expected. De Beauvoir once joked that two glasses left her feeling quite dizzy, long before any existential debates began. Decades later, science can explain why: Women’s bodies process alcohol differently from men’s — often faster and more intensely — and women’s brains also respond more strongly to its rewarding effects, even when drinking the same amount as men. How alcohol moves through the body Alcohol affects the body almost immediately. Before it hits the stomach, taste buds signal…