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Anyone who has seen The Shawshank Redemption will know that character of Brooks, the aging lifer who meets a tragic end when he is finally released after spending most of his life behind bars. The character may have hoped for better things on the outside.
As our latest Insights long read examines, hope is not a romanticised concept for aging inmates. It can be painful and some prefer to give up on all together. But it seems that institutions that fail to nuture hope, can ultimately end up failing society.
Fact-checking services might seem like an obvious response to misinformation, but they can end up backfiring. Understanding why people reject facts could help produce better solutions.
And new research has shed light on the extinction of the wooly rhino from an unlikely place – the inside of a wolf’s stomach.
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Paul Keaveny
Investigations Editor, Insights
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shutterstock/DANAI KHAMPIRANON
Marion Vannier, University of Manchester; Université Grenoble Alpes (UGA)
Hope is not a soft word in prison. It shapes how people cope with their sentence and it determines whether - and how - they engage with staff and other prisoners.
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Alina Kolyuka/Shutterstock
Kelly Fincham, University of Galway
Misinformation is not just a content problem, but an emotional and structural one.
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Woolly rhinos once roamed the Earth far and wide.
Daniel Eskridge/Shutterstock
Timothy Neal Coulson, University of Oxford
A new study shows the woolly rhino was not the inbred, genetically doomed species scientists had thought.
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World
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Leonie Fleischmann, City St George's, University of London
The ceasefire in Gaza is on shaky ground as Donald Trump looks to progress his peace plan on to its second phase.
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Caroline Kennedy-Pipe, Loughborough University
US wound down its presence in Greenland at the end of the cold war. Now it wants to beef it up again.
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Arts + Culture
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Matt Jacobsen, Queen Mary University of London
I would be surprised if anything else at the cinema in 2026 can match the bizarre spectacle of The Bone Temple’s best sequence.
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Joe Sheldon, University of Liverpool
Heated Rivalry is set within the popular but hyper-masculine space of a men’s professional sporting league.
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Business + Economy
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Akhil Bhardwaj, University of Bath
The perils of an AI-driven technocracy.
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Erhan Kilincarslan, University of Huddersfield
It helps to explain why falling inflation doesn’t necessarily ease pressure on household budgets.
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Education
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Qiqi Cheng, University of Manchester; Neil Humphrey, University of Manchester
The research found little evidence that time spent on social media or frequent gaming causes mental health problems in early-to-mid adolescence.
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Environment
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Thomas York, University of Leicester
Offshore wind contracts are ready – but ships, ports and cables are not.
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Richard K.F. Unsworth, Swansea University; Benjamin Jones, Swansea University
Marine biodiversity underpins human health such as at Porthdinllaen in north wales where seagrass is part of a marine social ecological system.
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Dhanapal Govindarajulu, University of Manchester
As urbanisation accelerates across India, the importance of urban forests is becoming more crucial.
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Health
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Barbara Jacquelyn Sahakian, University of Cambridge; Christelle Langley, University of Cambridge
Sadly, there is no cure for Huntington’s disease. But a couple new research papers suggests this may be about to change.
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Heba Ghazal, Kingston University
Urology departments in England and Wales have seen an increase in users admitted for bladder inflammation caused by ketamine use.
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Qiqi Cheng, University of Manchester; Neil Humphrey, University of Manchester
The research found little evidence that time spent on social media or frequent gaming causes mental health problems in early-to-mid adolescence.
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Science + Technology
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Vassilis Galanos, University of Stirling
The 25th anniversary of Wikipedia’s first public entry comes amid the rapid growth of Elon Musk’s AI-powered alternative, Grokipedia.
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