Features

  Schwarzenbruck / DPA When Tanya Markova was just 12 years old, her life changed literally overnight when a rare disease of the spinal cord left her completely paralysed. “I woke up one day, wanted to get dressed and go to school,” says the Bulgarian-born student, who’s now 24. But suddenly she felt a sharp pain in her back and ...

  Beijing / DPA Sunday is market day at the Temple of Heaven Park in central Beijing, with lots of haggling and touting of wares. “Woman, born 1988, 168 centimetres tall, 55 kilograms, nurse,” reads one notice among a row of other A4 sheets laid out on the paved ground. One man who looks to be in his mid-50s appears ...

  Lima / DPA Astrid Gutsche actually only wanted to open one restaurant in the Peruvian capital Lima. Now, when asked how many restaurants she has around the world, she has difficulty remembering; “I don’t want to know, it stresses me out,” she says. Her name and that of her husband Gaston Acurio are now a synonym for culinary excellence ...

  DPA Birgit Kaiser fingers the shiny pullover carefully, checking out first the material and then the neckline. “Low-cut necklines don’t suit me,” says the 39-year-old. But the jumper her friend Gabriele Weck has picked out for her has a high neckline and therefore it makes the shortlist. She’s been blind in her right eye since childhood. Until a few ...

  DPA A mobile game, of all things, is providing dementia researchers with huge amounts of data. Called Sea Hero Quest, it’s helping them understand how our brains navigate space and is being used to create a benchmark for early detection of dementia, one of the first symptoms of which is the loss of navigational skills. Participants in the project ...

  DPA Derek Ndinteh may be sitting in a windowless tiny office at one of South Africa’s less-well-known universities writing out an application for research funding, but this brilliant 40-year-old from Cameroon is confident. “I will be the first black Nobel laureate in chemistry,” says the researcher at the University of Johannesburg – “UJ” to its students. The role of ...

  Veitshoechheim / DPA “Before I came here I was unemployed for quite a while,” says 26-year-old Anna-Lisa Imkeller, as she stands at a high desk in the workshop of the Farassat Foundation. Her table is covered with post-it notes, pens and papers, the model of a wind turbine stands on a shelf and the wall is covered with large ...

  Bochum / DPA Heavily tattoed and pierced, wearing harem trousers and a fitted top at work: to look at Marion Marschalek, you might guess she’s a drifter doing the South-East Asian youth hostels, not a star mind at one of Germany’s oldest cyber security firms. The 28-year-old Austrian is in fact much in demand as a malware expert. Ever ...

  Vilcabamba / DPA Death among the middle-aged is a rare surprise in the Ecuadorian town of Vilcabamba. “She was just 43. Brain tumour. Very few die that young here,” muses William Benítez as the coffin containing Rosa Torres is borne down the street to the cemetery. Benítez is there to vend ice cream to the sweating pallbearers. “Actually, 100 ...

  Kaiserslautern / DPA When Professor Sabine Hoffmann invites you to sit down, there’s a surprise in store: the individualized office chairs she’s helping to develop can ventilate you from below. At the push of a button, their little built-in fans can blow air on the back or bottom. Men in particular like this feature, she says, as it helps ...