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Insights top stories

Illustration of people, animals and houses in the middle of a flood.

From Noah’s flood to Shakespeare’s storms, what literature reveals about our changing relationship with the weather

Stewart Mottram, University of Hull

Racism never went away – it simply changed shape

Lars Cornelissen, Manchester Metropolitan University; Independent Social Research Foundation

Man stands, arms spread wide during speech.
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

A woman sits on a pile of sacks

‘I have to talk about it so that the world can know what happened to women and girls in Sudan’ – rape and terror sparks mass migration

Sabine Lee, University of Birmingham; Heather Tasker, Dalhousie University, and Susan Bartels, Queen's University, Ontario

What do trees remember?

Estrella Luna-Diez, University of Birmingham; Anne-Marie Culhane, University of Exeter, and Bruno Barcante Ladvocat Cintra, University of Birmingham

The mighty Feanedock Oak tree.
Forensic linguistics: how dark web criminals give themselves away with their language

Emily Chiang, Aston University

A spiderweb
Israeli doctors reveal their conflicted stories of treating Palestinian prisoners held in notorious ‘black site’ Sde Teiman

Merav Amir, Queen's University Belfast and Hagar Kotef, SOAS, University of London

Israeli military personnel outside the secretive Sde Teiman detention centre
Underground data fortresses: the nuclear bunkers, mines and mountains being transformed to protect our ‘new gold’ from attack

A.R.E. Taylor, University of Exeter

Ariel photo of tunnels being dug into a mountainside.

Wealth and inequality

Protesters outside the Treasury in London with a banner calling to 'tax extreme wealth'.

The UK’s wealth ‘timebomb’ – and how to defuse it

Mike Savage, London School of Economics and Political Science

Illustration of escalators with a 'good' sing pointing up and 'bad' pointing down.

Bad wealth made good: how to tackle Britain’s twin faultlines of low growth and rising inequality

Stewart Lansley, University of Bristol

Full list of Insights articles here

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Editors' picks

Family farmers say their way of life is an impossible dream when ‘the bread of life is worth less than rusty metal’

Dan Taylor, The Open University and Amy Gibbons, University of Nottingham

Alt text
Our quest to find a truly Earth-like planet in deep space

Christopher Watson, Queen's University Belfast and Annelies Mortier, University of Birmingham

Animation showing the first 5,000 exoplanets to have been discovered.
‘We were treated like animals’: the full story of Britain’s deadliest small boat disaster

Travis Van Isacker, University of Bristol

A grieving woman touches a photograph of a mother and her three children.
‘I have it in my blood and brain … I still haven’t been able to shake this nightmare off.’ How voices from a forgotten archive of Nazi horrors are reshaping perceptions of the Holocaust

Håkan Håkansson, Lund University

Documents, a photo and a pass for a war crime trial.

Historical investigations

Man pushes bicycle in devastated city.

‘Then the city started to burn, the fires were chasing me’ – 80 years on, Hiroshima survivors describe how the atomic blast echoed down generations

Elizabeth Chappell, The Open University

Vikings were captivated by silver – our new analysis of their precious loot reveals how far they travelled to get it

Jane Kershaw, University of Oxford

A 1910 Russian painting of Scandinavian travellers in Viking armour meeting local dignitaries on the banks of the Dnieper River in eastern Europe.
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.
Fifty years ago, Junko Tabei became the first woman to summit Everest – why do so few people know her story?

Jenny Hall, York St John University

Mountaineer Junko Tabei stands atop Everest with a Japanese flag, and hugs her daughter amid a crowd of cameras back home.
Meet the forgotten enslaved and working-class labourers behind British exploration in Africa, Asia and Antarctica

Edward Armston-Sheret, School of Advanced Study, University of London

Meet the forgotten enslaved and working-class labourers behind British exploration in Africa, Asia and Antarctica

The story of globalisation

A world map showing the extent of the British Empire in 1886.

The rise and fall of globalisation: the battle to be top dog

Steve Schifferes, City St George's, University of London

A digital map of the world with financial icons overlaid.

The rise and fall of globalisation: why the world’s next financial meltdown could be much worse with the US on the sidelines

Steve Schifferes, City St George's, University of London

Artificial intelligence

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

Peng Zhou, Cardiff University

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

Addicted: rethinking the world's drug problem

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

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

Dr 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

illustration of prisoner looking at the light coming from outside the bars

‘People think you come out … and live happily ever after. If only.’ The reality of life after wrongful conviction

Faye Skelton, Edinburgh Napier University

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'
‘We are all lumped under one umbrella of hate’: when social attitudes change, what is life like for people who don’t agree?

Carol Ballantine, University College Dublin and Kath Browne, University College Dublin

Illustration of a woman standing apart and unhappy while five other people talk among themselves.
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

A woman with ME lies in bed covering her eyes.
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.

Politics

Welcome to post-growth Europe – can anyone accept this new political reality?

Peter Bloom, University of Essex

Illustration of a balloon with a European flag on it about to be popped by a large pin.
What is Alexei Navalny’s legacy for the people of Russia?

Ben Noble, UCL

Black-and-white photo of Alexei Navalny surrounded by flowers.
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.
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.

Climate insights

Tourists with their back to the camera take photographs of Mount Everest in the distance.

China’s Everest obsession: following Mallory’s footsteps a century on, I saw how tourism and climate change are transforming the mountain

Carl Cater, Swansea 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
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.
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

Melting glacier splashes into the sea
Wildlife wonders of Britain and Ireland before the industrial revolution – my research reveals all the biodiversity we’ve lost

Lee Raye, The Open University

Illustration of a wolf circa 1700.
Full list of Insights articles here

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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