I’ve been thinking a lot about my brain this year, specifically how to keep it healthy as I get older. That’s because I was recently the co-host of Uncharted Brain: Decoding Dementia, a series of podcast episodes and accompanying long-from articles produced with The Conversation’s podcast team.

We looked into the research around dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, including one story about the world’s longest running cohort study into human health which began in 1946. One of the key findings from that research was that heart health – even in people as young as 30 – could be a key indicator of “brain frailty” later in life.

As I’m 44, I thought it was time I started taking this stuff more seriously. I was re-listening to the podcast as I Iooked back over the long reads covered by The Conversation’s Insights team in 2022. One of the benefits of working in the Insights team is the sheer variety of stories we deal with every day.

We’ve tackled the big issues head-on, such as continuing our investigations into the sexual abuse allegations of UN peacekeepers in Haiti and the Democratic Republic of Congo. But we also look for the types of stories that are not being covered anywhere else, and do deeper dives into original research.

We’ve published articles on David Bowie and the birth of environmentalism in Sweden, and the day-to-day challenges of being a globetrotting digital nomad (it’s harder than you might think). We covered the untold story of a cold war double agent, what social media means to young people, met the cave-dwelling Palestinians struggling to live inside a military firing zone, went deep underground in Kosovo to understand why we all need to come to terms with the mining industry, and shone a spotlight on Qatar’s secretive death row. We aim to bring an equally wide range of investigations grounded in academic research to you in 2023.