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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

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?'
Writing long reads for The Conversation can be ‘instrumental’ in developing research – Insights story updates

Mike Herd, The Conversation and Paul Keaveny, The Conversation

Writing long reads for The Conversation can be ‘instrumental’ in developing research – Insights story updates

Investigations

Green grass and yellow flowers with icebergs on the sea in the background.

Greenland is getting greener – helped by a mining company and a group of tree enthusiasts

Adriana Craciun, Boston 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
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.
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
‘Our nuclear childhood’: the sisters who witnessed H-bomb tests on their Pacific island and are still coming to terms with the fallout

Christopher Hill, University of South Wales

Nuclear mushroom cloud over the Pacific island of Kiritimati in 1962
Full list of Insights articles here

Editors' picks

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.
‘Deep inside, something told me I had found the earliest human ancestor; I went numb’ – Yohannes Haile-Selassie on his lifetime quest to discover ancient humanity

Mike Herd, The Conversation

Scientist wearing a hat with desert landscape behind him
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
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.

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Historical investigations

A woman wearing jeans and a black shirt holds out her arm on which is tattooed a number.

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

Alice Bloch, University of Manchester

Making friends with the enemy: what stories of soldiers’ unexpected battlefield meetings reveal about the trauma of war

Holly Furneaux, Cardiff University

A black-and-white illustration of sleeping soldiers being captured during the first world war.
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.
Charlotte Delbo and the women of Convoy 31000: how researching their stories led me to a forgotten subcamp and Nazi lies in the Auschwitz archive

Kate Ferry-Swainson, Royal Holloway University of London

Train tracks to Auschwitz

Mental health series

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

A woman with ME lies in bed covering her eyes.

Ignored, blamed, and sometimes left to die – a leading expert in ME explains the origins of a modern medical scandal

Chris Ponting, University of Edinburgh

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'
The loneliness myth: what our shared stories of feeling alone reveal about why you can’t ‘fix’ this very human experience

Sam Carr, University of Bath

An illustration of a 'crowd' of lonely people
‘I couldn’t stand the pain’: the Turkish holiday resort that’s become an emergency dental centre for Britons who can’t get treated at home

Diana Ibanez-Tirado, University of Sussex

A billboard outside a dental treatment centre in Antalya, Turkey

Artificial intelligence

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
A ‘black box’ AI system has been influencing criminal justice decisions for over two decades – it’s time to open it up

Melissa Hamilton, University of Surrey and Pamela Ugwudike, University of Southampton

3D dissolving human head illustration
To understand the risks posed by AI, follow the money

Tim O'Reilly, UCL; Ilan Strauss, UCL; Mariana Mazzucato, UCL, and Rufus Rock, UCL

A financial graph.

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.

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