Author: DW

US tennis giant Serena Williams confirmed on Monday that she will return to the sport, after it became known that she would compete in doubles at the HSBC Championships at Queen’s Club next week. “Guess everybody heard the news,” she wrote in an Instagram video post, which showed her walking on the court, racket in hand. Williams won her last Grand Slam singles title in 2017. She has not competed in tennis since the 2022 US Open. Since then, she gave birth to two daughters. The tennis legend never actually used the word ‘retirement’ when she stepped away from tennis, saying instead…

When the world seems to be falling apart, people look for something to hold on to. “Now, more than ever, with the world plagued by crises and at risk of being engulfed by war, there is a growing desire for unity,” says Evelyn Meining, artistic director of the Mozartfest Würzburg. Throughout history, the genius and beauty of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s music has frequently provided comfort during times of crisis — and it continues to do so today. “As a composer, he is a figurehead, especially when there is a sense of hyper-stimulation and polarization,” Meining tells DW. That is why the…

North Korea runs one of the most bizarre economies on the planet. Despite being one of only a handful of nations with nuclear weapons, its 2024 gross domestic product (GDP) was a paltry $26.6 billion (€22.9 billion). This is about 70 times smaller than South Korea’s $1.86 trillion economy and about a fifth of the annual revenue of the world’s top-traded company, Nvidia. Thanks to a centrally planned economy that prioritizes domestic production, North Korea is nowhere near as reliant on trade as your average free-market economy, partly due to international sanctions, introduced by the United Nations in 2017 over its nuclear weapons and ballistic…

Your DNA has never been created from scratch. Think of it like a recipe — passed down from parent to child over countless generations, all the way back 4 billion years to the earliest life on Earth. With tweaks and changes accumulating along the way, but always copied from something that already existed.  That’s the one rule that has held the entire time: to make DNA, you need existing genetic material to copy from.  Scientists just found a protein that breaks this rule. A mechanism nobody has seen before “It was quite a surprise!” Alex Gao, a biochemist at Stanford…

The interwar Weimar Republic period is often referred to as a “Golden Age” of culture and creativity in Germany. It was a time when groundbreaking movements, from Bauhaus architecture and experimental cinema to avant-garde art and theater, flourished against the backdrop of economic catastrophe and extreme political polarization. In cities such as Berlin, where speakeasies, cabarets and hedonistic nightlife were the norm, a radical new genre of music became immensely popular. Jazz, which emerged from African American communities in the Deep South, was first brought to Germany by pioneering artists from the US, UK and France after World War I. Josephine Baker,…

Imagine rockets being launched from the Azores, an archipelago out in the Atlantic Ocean, carrying Portuguese-built satellites into space — and then picture reusable space capsules returning to base. While this may sound like a rather futuristic scenario, elements of it could soon become reality. Portugal, after all, is working hard to become a spacefaring nation, with the help of its many highly skilled engineers and EU cooperation. “Portugal has modernized considerably over the past 20 years,” Portuguese Space Agency President Ricardo Conde tells DW. “Our universities produce outstanding engineers. We have created human capital that we can build on.” Conde, whose agency…

Day or night, rain or shine, wherever they’re released, trained pigeons can find their way home over distances as high as almost 1,000 kilometers (around 600 miles). It’s a skill humans have made use of since time immemorial. And for around a century, scientists have known that magnetoreception plays a part in the birds’ navigational cocktail.  A research team from the University of Bonn and the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior wrote in the journal Science this week that a core part of the secret to homing using magnetic fields may lie in the birds’ livers. India: Meet the woman passionate about pigeon…

As Paris Saint-Germain tightened the screws on Arsenal over two absorbing hours, the drums in the crowd behind the goal matched their relentless intensity. It was enough to push PSG past Arsenal 4-3 on penalties after the Champions League final in Budapest ended 1-1 after extra time on Saturday.  Players, crowd and coach — PSG are a club united. “Today, we can say we are the best in Europe. We take pleasure in playing with this group. We’re all humble, and that makes you want to give more. But we just want to celebrate with the people of Paris,” said…

“With today’s cabinet resolution, we are ensuring that the German film industry will become a global player in film production,” Germany’s Culture and Media Minister Wolfram Weimer said on Wednesday. He described the coalition government’s draft bill, which still needs to be voted on by parliament, as a “film booster.” According to Weimer, never before has so much money been allocated to the domestic film industry. In fact, it will be almost double anything previously allocated, totaling €250 million ($291 million). Along with other funding programs, the government is reportedly committing more than €300 million to film productions. Additional funding from Germany’s…

Germany’s coalition government of Christian Democrats (CDU) and Social Democrats (SPD) is seeking to overturn the central provision of the heating law introduced by the previous administration. The original law stipulated that all heating systems installed in the coming years must run on at least 65% renewable energy. Under the new proposals, however, oil and gas heating systems with significantly lower shares of climate-friendly gases would still be allowed in existing buildings for a longer period. The cabinet approved the plan based on a draft bill submitted by Building Minister Verena Hubertz (SPD) and Economy Minister Katherina Reiche (CDU). Under the…