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2,000-year-old painted 'terracotta army' figures from an ancient Chinese burial chamber.

What 2,000 years of Chinese history reveals about today’s AI-driven technology panic – and the future of inequality

Peng Zhou, Cardiff University

Toxic chemical pollution continues on Isle of Man as government defends Unesco conservation status

Anna Turns, The Conversation and Patrick Byrne, Liverpool John Moores University

beautiful coastal bay, sandy beach and blue sea with green rocky coastline
Pollution scientist talks to freshwater ecologist who warned of Isle of Man toxic silt dumps

Patrick Byrne, Liverpool John Moores University

wooden bench on coast, overlooking bay with town and blue sea
Insights – The Conversation’s long reads section

Mike Herd, The Conversation and Paul Keaveny, The Conversation

A close up of a typewriter, saying 'What's your story?'

Investigations

Two people wearing protective gear and gas masks carry out experiment.

Inside Porton Down: what I learned during three years at the UK’s most secretive chemical weapons laboratory

Thomas Keegan, Lancaster University

Digging into an environmental scandal on the Isle of Man

Anna Turns, The Conversation

flatlay shot of keyboard, magnifying glass, paper and books on desk
What is Navalny’s legacy for Russia?

Ben Noble, UCL

Black-and-white photo of Alexei Navalny surrounded by flowers.
‘I’m utterly utterly despondent and disappointed.’ Bereaved families describe being failed by the inquest system

Jessica Jacobson, Birkbeck, University of London; Alex Murray, Birkbeck, University of London, and Lorna Templeton, University of Bath

Burning candles.
Engineering hope: how I made it my mission to help rebuild Ukraine’s critical infrastructure

Nadiia Kopiika, University of Birmingham

People crossing a river on planks as bridge is destroyed
Full list of Insights articles here

Editors' picks

Convicting the innocent: how a rotten system ensures miscarriages of justice will continue

Brian Thornton, University of Winchester

Man wearing 'innocent' t-shirt raises fist after being cleared of a crime
History’s crisis detectives: how we’re using maths and data to reveal why societies collapse – and clues about the future

Daniel Hoyer, University of Toronto

Oil painting depicting the assassination of Julius Caesar.
Greenland is getting greener – helped by a mining company and a group of tree enthusiasts

Adriana Craciun, Boston University

Green grass and yellow flowers with icebergs on the sea in the background.
How Britain got its first internet connection – by the late pioneer who made it happen

Peter T. Kirstein, UCL

How Britain got its first internet connection – by the late pioneer who made it happen

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Addicted: rethinking the world's drug problems

Illustration of a bloody US dollar note being hung on a washing line.

Money laundering plays a key role in every part of the illegal drugs industry – here’s how it works

Mark Berry, Bournemouth University and R.V. Gundur, University of the West of Scotland

Addicted: how the world got hooked on illicit drugs – and why we need to view this as a global threat like climate change

Ian Hamilton, University of York

World map created out of assorted pills.
Homeless Britons say cost of addiction is forcing them into modern slavery – so why are they not being recognised as victims?

Emily Kenway, University of Edinburgh

A man sleeping on the streets in Edinburgh.
‘There has never been a more dangerous time to take drugs’: the rising global threat of nitazenes and synthetic opioids

Philip A. Berry, King's College London

Five laboratory images showing samples and analysis of nitazene drugs.
Read the full series, Addicted, here

Artificial intelligence

DeepSeek: how China’s embrace of open-source AI caused a geopolitical earthquake

Peter Bloom, University of Essex

Robotic arms with US and China flags on their gloves.
Sex machina: in the wild west world of human-AI relationships, the lonely and vulnerable are most at risk

James Muldoon, University of Essex

'I heart you' spelled out in red neon-effect lighting.
AI will soon become impossible for humans to comprehend – the story of neural networks tells us why

David Beer, University of York

A neural networks concept
The brain is the most complicated object in the universe. This is the story of scientists’ quest to decode it – and read people’s minds

Nicholas J. Kelley, University of Southampton; Stephanie Sheir, University of Bristol, and Timo Istace, University of Antwerp

Three neuroscience researchers pose behind a large fMRI brain scanner

Historical investigations

An artist's impression of Sherbro Island City.

From a colonial hill town to Idris Elba’s island masterplan: what do these Sierra Leone developments tell us about urban elites?

Milo Gough, University of Manchester

Descendants of Holocaust survivors explain why they are replicating Auschwitz tattoos on their own bodies

Alice Bloch, University of Manchester

A woman wearing jeans and a black shirt holds out her arm on which is tattooed a number.
Shoplifting is now at record levels. Here’s how it went from a crime punishable by death to police ‘turning a blind eye’

Charlotte Wildman, University of Manchester

Artist posing with a shopping trolley full of 'stolen' items outside a broken shop window.
Britain’s ‘broken’ water system: a history of death, denial and diarrhoea

Lukas Engelmann, University of Edinburgh and Jacob Steere-Williams, College of Charleston

A horrified woman looks through an old-fashioned microscope at creatures supposedly living in a drop of River Thames water.
My grandfather was ‘Mr Health and Safety’. His life’s quest to make work safer has been ridiculed – but the rise of the gig economy shows it’s no joke

Simon Harold Walker, University of Glasgow

Smiling man in suit and tie, with factory workers behind him.

Mental health

Why people self-injure: ‘You have no other voice – and no one would listen anyway’

Peter Steggals, Newcastle University

A hand with 'HELP' written on its bandaged wrist
For people with mental illness, drugs and alcohol can be a key survival strategy. I’ve learned they shouldn’t have to ‘get clean’ to get treatment

Simon Bratt, University of Staffordshire

Man drinking from a bottle of alcohol, with more empty bottles in the foreground.
Insomnia: how chronic sleep problems can lead to a spiralling decline in mental health

Scott Cairney, University of York and Aidan Horner, University of York

Illustration of tired-looking man suffering from insomnia
How music heals us, even when it’s sad – by a neuroscientist leading a new study of musical therapy

Leigh Riby, Northumbria University, Newcastle

Illustration of a person's brain when listening to musical notes.
Read the full series of articles here

Unheard voices

Overcrowded flat at Maddocks House

Grenfell should have been a wake-up call – but the UK still doesn’t take fire safety seriously because of who is most at risk

Shane Ewen, Leeds Beckett University

‘I couldn’t care less if I saw another sunrise’ – what older people who are ‘tired of life’ can tell us about the assisted dying debate

Sam Carr, University of Bath; Els van Wijngaarden, Radboud University, and Kenneth Chambaere, Ghent University

Illustration of an old man with a walking stick walking off into the distance
Dying is more painful when society won’t listen – stories of financial hardship that show how end-of-life care needs to change

Naomi Richards, University of Glasgow

Sad-looking woman gazing out of the window of her apartment
The Innu have lived in eastern Canada for thousands of years, yet their rights to this land are increasingly threatened by the question: who is Indigenous?

Colin Samson, University of Essex

Multiple generations of an Innu family disembark from a motorised canoe.
Assisted dying: first-hand accounts of what it’s like to help a loved one die

Nancy Preston, Lancaster University and Jane Lowers, Emory University

Old typewriter with words 'The End'

Climate insights

Melting glacier splashes into the sea

The overshoot myth: you can’t keep burning fossil fuels and expect scientists of the future to get us back to 1.5°C

James Dyke, University of Exeter; Robert Watson, University of East Anglia, and Wolfgang Knorr, Lund University

Victims of the green energy boom? The Indonesians facing eviction over a China-backed plan to turn their island into a solar panel ‘ecocity’

Nikita Sud, University of Oxford

Masked people in a large protest.
A Peruvian farmer is trying to hold energy giant RWE responsible for climate change – the inside story of his groundbreaking court case

Noah Walker-Crawford, UCL

Peruvian man standing in front of a glass building
The melting Arctic is a crime scene. The microbes I study have long warned us of this catastrophe – but they are also driving it

Arwyn Edwards, Aberystwyth University

Aerial view of the point where an icy glacier becomes a river.
Climate scientists: concept of net zero is a dangerous trap

James Dyke, University of Exeter; Robert Watson, University of East Anglia, and Wolfgang Knorr, Lund University

Smoke rises from a chimney against a sunset sky.
Full list of Insights articles here

Politics

Inequality is dividing England. Is devolution the answer?

Michael Kenny, University of Cambridge

Person walking up stairs in front of a large advert for the city of Sunderland.
Freedom of thought is being threatened by states, big tech and even ourselves. Here’s what we can do to protect it

Simon McCarthy-Jones, Trinity College Dublin

Illustration of man with disfigured head being watched by a surveillance camera.
Politics urgently needs more imagination. Competence alone will not save us from this ‘polycrisis’

Geoff Mulgan, UCL

UK politicians standing together in a large group
The authoritarian leader’s playbook: how Narendra Modi captured India’s legal system and is rewriting the country’s history in his image

Sandhya Fuchs, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Man dressed in white suit stands inside white temple bedecked with flowers.

Ancient humans

Three skulls of differing ancient hominin species.

The whole story of human evolution – from ancient apes via Lucy to us

John Gowlett, University of Liverpool

‘Deep inside, something told me I had found the earliest human ancestor; I went numb’

Mike Herd, The Conversation

Scientist wearing a hat with desert landscape behind him
Fifty years after the discovery of Lucy, it’s time to ‘decolonise paleoanthropology’ says leading Ethiopian fossil expert – podcast

Gemma Ware, The Conversation and Mike Herd, The Conversation

Close-up of a man holdiing a replica of an ancient hominin skull.

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