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A 1910 Russian painting of Scandinavian travellers in Viking armour meeting local dignitaries on the banks of the Dnieper River in eastern Europe.

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

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

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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

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

What caused Britain’s deadliest ‘small boat’ disaster, and how can another be avoided?

Travis Van Isacker, University of Bristol

A grieving woman touches a photograph of a mother and her three children.
‘People who spent years saving lives are now struggling to survive’ – how we witnessed Trump’s USAID cuts devastate health programmes in Kenya

Rachael Eastham, Lancaster University and Christopher Baguma, Lancaster University

View of a Kenyan town on Lake Victoria.
The Waldorf Astoria: what the history of this legendary hotel says about today’s crisis of the American establishment

Alex Prior, London South Bank University

The front of a hotel lit up at night
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

Tourists with their back to the camera take photographs of Mount Everest in the distance.
Full list of Insights articles here

Editors' picks

Mountains of fire: what hillwalking with my father taught me about the origins of oil exploration

Yvonne Reddick, University of Lancashire

The author pictured as a child with her dad and younger sister in the Cairngorms.
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.
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.
Damien Hirst at 60: a genius who never stops stretching our understanding of art and life – or a tired trickster ruined by his riches?

Daisy Dixon, Cardiff University and Elisabeth Schellekens, Uppsala University

Close-up of artist Damien Hirst with his hands covering his face

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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

Artificial intelligence

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.
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

Historical investigations

Artist posing with a shopping trolley full of 'stolen' items outside a broken shop window.

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

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

Thomas Keegan, Lancaster University

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

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

Old typewriter with words 'The End'

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

‘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.
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.
‘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

Climate insights

beautiful coastal bay, sandy beach and blue sea with green rocky coastline

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

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

Tourists with their back to the camera take photographs of Mount Everest in the distance.
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
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.
Full list of Insights articles here

Politics

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.
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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