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Canada's 5 greatest inventions — Wonderbra, five-pin bowling, the light bulb, the telephone & insulin. The real engineering, human drama, and ethical choices behind each. Featuring the $1 insulin patent that changed medicine forever.

This is Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy

Independent, moderated, timely, deep, gentle, clinical, global, and community conversations about things that matter.  Breathe Easy, we go deep and lightly surface the big ideas.

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Disclosure: This podcast uses AI-generated synthetic voices for a material portion of the audio content, in line with Apple Podcasts guidelines.

We make rigorous science accessible, accurate, and unforgettable.

Produced by Michelle Bruecker and Scott Bleackley, it features reviews of emerging research and ideas from leading thinkers, curated under our creative direction with AI assistance for voice, imagery, and composition. Systemic voices and illustrative images of people are representative tools, not depictions of specific individuals.

We dive deep into peer-reviewed research, pre-prints, and major scientific works—then bring them to life through the stories of the researchers themselves. Complex ideas become clear. Obscure discoveries become conversation starters. And you walk away understanding not just what scientists discovered, but why it matters and how they got there.

Independent, moderated, timely, deep, gentle, clinical, global, and community conversations about things that matter. Breathe Easy, we go deep and lightly surface the big ideas.

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And why that might be the most human thing about it.

There's a particular kind of relief that arrives uninvited, like sunlight breaking through a cloud you'd stopped watching. I felt it while reading a paper from Anthropic and EPFL this year — a paper with the delightful, audacious title The Hot Mess of AI. It arrived not like a research paper so much as a permission slip. Permission to stop fearing the cold, calculating god-machine, and to start recognizing something far more familiar in its place.

The Hot Mess of AI: How Does Misalignment Scale with Model Intelligence and Task Complexity? — Hegley, Soldikstein et al., Anthropic / EPFL, ICLR 2026

• Plus 22 additional papers for context, see more here

Thanks to Cecile G. Tamura for flagging this paper.

Series: The Hidden Logic: How Chaos, Flow, and Matter Shape Intelligence

Learning To Dance With Chaos 
S6 E4 Dec 21, 2025

The Wet Logic of Being: Why Silicon Dreams Can’t Wake Up 
S6 E8 Dec 29, 2025

The Gentle Art of Taming Chaos: What Neural Networks Teach Us About Living With Turbulence 
S6 E20 Jan, 22, 2026

When Chaos Becomes the Solution: What Dancing Particles Teach Us About Hidden Order S6 E22 Jan 26, 2026

When Chaos Becomes the Compass: What Quantum Computing Teaches Us About Living With Uncertainty 
S6 E26 Feb 3, 2026

The Comfort of Chaos: Why the Smartest AI Will Always Be a Mess 
S6 E36 Feb, 23, 2026

This is Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy

Independent, moderated, timely, deep, gentle, clinical, global, and community conversations about things that matter.  Breathe Easy, we go deep and lightly surface the big ideas.

Support the show

Disclosure: This podcast uses AI-generated synthetic voices for a material portion of the audio content, in line with Apple Podcasts guidelines.

We make rigorous science accessible, accurate, and unforgettable.

Produced by Michelle Bruecker and Scott Bleackley, it features reviews of emerging research and ideas from leading thinkers, curated under our creative direction with AI assistance for voice, imagery, and composition. Systemic voices and illustrative images of people are representative tools, not depictions of specific individuals.

We dive deep into peer-reviewed research, pre-prints, and major scientific works—then bring them to life through the stories of the researchers themselves. Complex ideas become clear. Obscure discoveries become conversation starters. And you walk away understanding not just what scientists discovered, but why it matters and how they got there.

Independent, moderated, timely, deep, gentle, clinical, global, and community conversations about things that matter. Breathe Easy, we go deep and lightly surface the big ideas.

Spoken word, short and sweet, with rhythm and a catchy beat.
http://tinyurl.com/stonefolksongs

Send a text

Read the companion article 

The most stunning discovery comes from recent research on Spanish crows. For centuries, we thought crows were just loud, aggressive scavengers. Turns out we were listening at the wrong volume.

When researchers placed sensitive microphones near crow families—close enough to capture sounds below human hearing range—they discovered an entire secondary language. Soft, intimate calls used exclusively within family units. Parents teaching children how to extract food from complex sources. Coordinating group tasks. Expressing what researchers described as 'joy, longing, and fear.'

We missed this for centuries because we never put the microphone close enough.

Think about that. An entire dimension of crow society—their whisper network, their family secrets—was invisible to us. If we went for centuries missing the crows whispering to their children, what else are we missing?

This is Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy

Independent, moderated, timely, deep, gentle, clinical, global, and community conversations about things that matter.  Breathe Easy, we go deep and lightly surface the big ideas.

Support the show

Disclosure: This podcast uses AI-generated synthetic voices for a material portion of the audio content, in line with Apple Podcasts guidelines.

We make rigorous science accessible, accurate, and unforgettable.

Produced by Michelle Bruecker and Scott Bleackley, it features reviews of emerging research and ideas from leading thinkers, curated under our creative direction with AI assistance for voice, imagery, and composition. Systemic voices and illustrative images of people are representative tools, not depictions of specific individuals.

We dive deep into peer-reviewed research, pre-prints, and major scientific works—then bring them to life through the stories of the researchers themselves. Complex ideas become clear. Obscure discoveries become conversation starters. And you walk away understanding not just what scientists discovered, but why it matters and how they got there.

Independent, moderated, timely, deep, gentle, clinical, global, and community conversations about things that matter. Breathe Easy, we go deep and lightly surface the big ideas.

Spoken word, short and sweet, with rhythm and a catchy beat.
http://tinyurl.com/stonefolksongs

Send a text

📖 Read the companion article

Let me tell you something about systems.

Systems — whether they govern corporations, nations, or the inner architecture of an elite athlete’s mind — tend to demand perfection in exchange for belonging. They offer a transaction: give us everything, and we will give you a place at the table. Jennifer Jones, Canadian curling legend and the subject of our latest deep dive on Heliox, understood this transaction from childhood. She accepted it. She even mastered it. And then, after decades of being one of the most decorated women in the history of her sport, she did something the system never quite planned for.

Rock Star: My Life On and Off the Ice

Why This Olympic Sport Bothers Physicists

Jennifer Jones (curler) - Wikipedia

This is Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy

Independent, moderated, timely, deep, gentle, clinical, global, and community conversations about things that matter.  Breathe Easy, we go deep and lightly surface the big ideas.

Support the show

Disclosure: This podcast uses AI-generated synthetic voices for a material portion of the audio content, in line with Apple Podcasts guidelines.

We make rigorous science accessible, accurate, and unforgettable.

Produced by Michelle Bruecker and Scott Bleackley, it features reviews of emerging research and ideas from leading thinkers, curated under our creative direction with AI assistance for voice, imagery, and composition. Systemic voices and illustrative images of people are representative tools, not depictions of specific individuals.

We dive deep into peer-reviewed research, pre-prints, and major scientific works—then bring them to life through the stories of the researchers themselves. Complex ideas become clear. Obscure discoveries become conversation starters. And you walk away understanding not just what scientists discovered, but why it matters and how they got there.

Independent, moderated, timely, deep, gentle, clinical, global, and community conversations about things that matter. Breathe Easy, we go deep and lightly surface the big ideas.

Spoken word, short and sweet, with rhythm and a catchy beat.
http://tinyurl.com/stonefolksongs

Send a text

📖 Read the companion article

About Love, Grief, and Being Human

In northwestern Iran, at a site called Chaparabad, archaeologists recently uncovered something that rewrites not what we know about the past, but how we feel about it. Two ceramic vessels, dating back 6,500 years to the mid-5th millennium BCE, contained fetal remains preserved against impossible odds.

One jar was buried beneath a kitchen floor, alongside the bones of a sacrificed sheep. The other rested near grain storage, unadorned but deliberately positioned. These weren't royal children. There were no golden grave goods, no inscriptions, no monuments. Just clay vessels shaped like wombs, cradling what never got to be.

Through 305 precise skeletal measurements—a forensic miracle given how rarely fetal bones survive—researchers determined both infants were approximately 36-38 weeks gestational age. Full term. Babies who should have been born. Who were expected. Who were, perhaps, already named in the private languages of hope that parents whisper when they feel that first kick.

This episode challenges:

• The assumption that frequent infant mortality created emotional distance
• The focus on monumental archaeology over ordinary human stories
• The idea that ancient peoples were fundamentally different from us

Reference:

Fetal vessel burials dated to 6500 years ago at the Chaparabad archaeological site, Northwestern Iran

This is Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy

Independent, moderated, timely, deep, gentle, clinical, global, and community conversations about things that matter.  Breathe Easy, we go deep and lightly surface the big ideas.

Support the show

Disclosure: This podcast uses AI-generated synthetic voices for a material portion of the audio content, in line with Apple Podcasts guidelines.

We make rigorous science accessible, accurate, and unforgettable.

Produced by Michelle Bruecker and Scott Bleackley, it features reviews of emerging research and ideas from leading thinkers, curated under our creative direction with AI assistance for voice, imagery, and composition. Systemic voices and illustrative images of people are representative tools, not depictions of specific individuals.

We dive deep into peer-reviewed research, pre-prints, and major scientific works—then bring them to life through the stories of the researchers themselves. Complex ideas become clear. Obscure discoveries become conversation starters. And you walk away understanding not just what scientists discovered, but why it matters and how they got there.

Independent, moderated, timely, deep, gentle, clinical, global, and community conversations about things that matter. Breathe Easy, we go deep and lightly surface the big ideas.

Spoken word, short and sweet, with rhythm and a catchy beat.
http://tinyurl.com/stonefolksongs

Send a text

📖 Read the full essay

We keep imagining AI as a centralized brain in a data center, getting smarter and smarter until it solves everything or destroys everything. But what if the future of intelligence is distributed? What if it's millions of people in constant conversation, constantly debating values and priorities, and AI systems that learn from that living stream of democratic discourse?  What if that is our emerging economy that attracts others worldwide?

The question is whether we have the courage to build something genuinely new, or whether we'll just optimize the systems that are already crushing us.

That's the sprint we're really running.

The Canadian ISED AI consultation provided 64,600 distinct answers to that question. Now comes the harder part: Deciding which answers we will live by.

Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada AI Engagement

ISED AI Engagement dataset - ISED AI consultation dataset
ISED AI Engagement task force reports - Task Force reports for ISED consultation on AI

ENGAGEMENTS ON CANADA’S NEXT AI STRATEGY: Summary of Inputs

People’s Consultation on AI

Ottawa releases findings from AI task force and public consultation

Minister Evan Solomon reveals Canada’s AI Task Force

Canada’s new AI strategy is off to a bad start

Evan Solomon Wants Canada to Trust AI. Can We Trust Evan Solomon?

This is Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy

Independent, moderated, timely, deep, gentle, clinical, global, and community conversations about things that matter.  Breathe Easy, we go deep and lightly surface the big ideas.

Support the show

Disclosure: This podcast uses AI-generated synthetic voices for a material portion of the audio content, in line with Apple Podcasts guidelines.

We make rigorous science accessible, accurate, and unforgettable.

Produced by Michelle Bruecker and Scott Bleackley, it features reviews of emerging research and ideas from leading thinkers, curated under our creative direction with AI assistance for voice, imagery, and composition. Systemic voices and illustrative images of people are representative tools, not depictions of specific individuals.

We dive deep into peer-reviewed research, pre-prints, and major scientific works—then bring them to life through the stories of the researchers themselves. Complex ideas become clear. Obscure discoveries become conversation starters. And you walk away understanding not just what scientists discovered, but why it matters and how they got there.

Independent, moderated, timely, deep, gentle, clinical, global, and community conversations about things that matter. Breathe Easy, we go deep and lightly surface the big ideas.

Spoken word, short and sweet, with rhythm and a catchy beat.
http://tinyurl.com/stonefolksongs

Send a text

📖 Read the article

What does a drought look like when you're standing knee-deep in snow?

This episode explores one of the most counterintuitive climate findings of 2026: Canada's total snow water storage increased 50% over two decades, yet water security is collapsing. Based on groundbreaking research published in January 2026 in Communications Earth and Environment, we unpack how both statements can be true—and why this paradox matters far beyond Canada's borders.

The Three-Part Problem:

GEOGRAPHY: Almost all snowpack increases occurred in the Arctic and sub-Arctic tundra—remote regions where the water benefits virtually no one. Meanwhile, the Western Cordillera mountain ranges (Rockies, Coast Mountains) covering just 3% of landmass but providing water for millions are experiencing what researchers call "creeping snow drought."

MEASUREMENT: We've been optimizing for the wrong metric. Snow depth tells us how tall the pile is, but snow water availability (SWA) reveals how much actual liquid water is stored. The difference? Massive. Light powder and heavy slush can have identical depth but 5x different water content. It's like counting dollar bills without checking if they're $1 or $100.

TIMING: Snow functions as a natural battery—storing winter precipitation and releasing it slowly through spring and summer exactly when cities, farms, and hydroelectric systems need it. As climate warms, more precipitation falls as rain instead of snow. Rain doesn't wait around; it floods immediately then flows to the ocean. Come July, when everyone is desperate, the battery is empty.

This is Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy

Independent, moderated, timely, deep, gentle, clinical, global, and community conversations about things that matter.  Breathe Easy, we go deep and lightly surface the big ideas.

Support the show

Disclosure: This podcast uses AI-generated synthetic voices for a material portion of the audio content, in line with Apple Podcasts guidelines.

We make rigorous science accessible, accurate, and unforgettable.

Produced by Michelle Bruecker and Scott Bleackley, it features reviews of emerging research and ideas from leading thinkers, curated under our creative direction with AI assistance for voice, imagery, and composition. Systemic voices and illustrative images of people are representative tools, not depictions of specific individuals.

We dive deep into peer-reviewed research, pre-prints, and major scientific works—then bring them to life through the stories of the researchers themselves. Complex ideas become clear. Obscure discoveries become conversation starters. And you walk away understanding not just what scientists discovered, but why it matters and how they got there.

Independent, moderated, timely, deep, gentle, clinical, global, and community conversations about things that matter. Breathe Easy, we go deep and lightly surface the big ideas.

Spoken word, short and sweet, with rhythm and a catchy beat.
http://tinyurl.com/stonefolksongs

Send a text

📖 Read the full essay

I've been thinking about coffee shops lately. Not in the precious, writerly way where I romanticize the smell of roasted beans and the clatter of ceramic cups. I mean the moment right before you walk in—that electrical jolt when you round the corner and see the familiar sign glowing in the window. That tiny spike of pleasure that happens before you've tasted anything, before the caffeine has touched your bloodstream, before the reward has actually arrived.

That feeling? It's your brain time traveling. And according to new research from McGill University, it might be the most important thing your brain does.

The research discussed here is from "Predictive Coding of Reward in the Hippocampus" by Mohamed Yagubi and colleagues, published in Nature. For those interested in the technical details, the paper provides remarkable evidence for how biological neural networks implement reinforcement learning at the cellular level—a finding that bridges neuroscience, psychology, and artificial intelligence in profound ways.

Predictive Coding of Reward in the Hippocampus

This is Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy

Independent, moderated, timely, deep, gentle, clinical, global, and community conversations about things that matter.  Breathe Easy, we go deep and lightly surface the big ideas.

Support the show

Disclosure: This podcast uses AI-generated synthetic voices for a material portion of the audio content, in line with Apple Podcasts guidelines.

We make rigorous science accessible, accurate, and unforgettable.

Produced by Michelle Bruecker and Scott Bleackley, it features reviews of emerging research and ideas from leading thinkers, curated under our creative direction with AI assistance for voice, imagery, and composition. Systemic voices and illustrative images of people are representative tools, not depictions of specific individuals.

We dive deep into peer-reviewed research, pre-prints, and major scientific works—then bring them to life through the stories of the researchers themselves. Complex ideas become clear. Obscure discoveries become conversation starters. And you walk away understanding not just what scientists discovered, but why it matters and how they got there.

Independent, moderated, timely, deep, gentle, clinical, global, and community conversations about things that matter. Breathe Easy, we go deep and lightly surface the big ideas.

Spoken word, short and sweet, with rhythm and a catchy beat.
http://tinyurl.com/stonefolksongs

Send a text

Read companion article 

Listen on YouTube

The iconic double sunset from Star Wars promised us alien worlds bathed in twin starlight—romantic, plausible, inevitable. Binary star systems are everywhere. Most stars are born with companions. Planet formation should work. The Tatooine fantasy should be real.

Then NASA's Kepler telescope revealed the truth: a cosmic graveyard.

Among 3,000 perfectly observed eclipsing binary systems, Kepler found only 14 confirmed circumbinary planets. In tight binaries where stars orbit each other in less than seven days, the count drops to zero. This isn't statistical noise—it's a cliff edge. A desert so barren it has its own name.

But this isn't a story about planets that never formed. It's a murder mystery.

The Weapon: Apsidal Resonance

New astrophysical research reveals a mechanism called apsidal resonance—a gravitational trap powered by Einstein's general relativity. As tidal forces cause binary stars to spiral closer together over millions of years, this resonance sweeps through their planetary disk like a cosmic broom, systematically destroying every world it touches.

The process is elegant and brutal: resonance locks onto a planet's orbit and pumps energy in with every pass, stretching the orbit into a deadly ellipse. The planet swings dangerously close to its suns, experiences crushing tides, loses atmosphere, and eventually either crashes, gets ejected to interstellar space, or tears itself apart.

Reference: Apsidal Resonance and the Decimation of Planets around Inspiraling Binaries

This is Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy

Independent, moderated, timely, deep, gentle, clinical, global, and community conversations about things that matter.  Breathe Easy, we go deep and lightly surface the big ideas.

Support the show

Disclosure: This podcast uses AI-generated synthetic voices for a material portion of the audio content, in line with Apple Podcasts guidelines.

We make rigorous science accessible, accurate, and unforgettable.

Produced by Michelle Bruecker and Scott Bleackley, it features reviews of emerging research and ideas from leading thinkers, curated under our creative direction with AI assistance for voice, imagery, and composition. Systemic voices and illustrative images of people are representative tools, not depictions of specific individuals.

We dive deep into peer-reviewed research, pre-prints, and major scientific works—then bring them to life through the stories of the researchers themselves. Complex ideas become clear. Obscure discoveries become conversation starters. And you walk away understanding not just what scientists discovered, but why it matters and how they got there.

Independent, moderated, timely, deep, gentle, clinical, global, and community conversations about things that matter. Breathe Easy, we go deep and lightly surface the big ideas.

Spoken word, short and sweet, with rhythm and a catchy beat.
http://tinyurl.com/stonefolksongs

Send a text

📖 Read the full essay

There's a particular kind of morning where the world feels too heavy. You wake up, stumble to the kitchen, and all you want—all you need—is coffee. But if you pause for just a moment and really look at what's around you, something strange happens. The kitchen stops being a kitchen and becomes... data. Thousands of objects. Millions of photons. The grain of the countertop. The exact angle of the chair leg. The three bananas in the fruit bowl (was it three yesterday?). If you actually tried to process all of this, to hold it all in your mind at once, you'd probably just sit down on the floor and give up.

But you don't. You never do. You walk straight to the coffee pot, dodge the chair, step over the Lego from last night, and hit the brew button. It feels effortless, which is the first lie your brain tells you every single day.

New research from MIT and the University of British Columbia has cracked open something profound about how we move through the world, and it turns out we've been dramatically overestimating our own computational power. For decades, cognitive scientists believed our brains worked like supercomputers—scanning entire environments, building perfect 3D maps, calculating optimal paths. We were rational economists of perception, carefully weighing every detail before acting.

We were wrong.

Just in Time" World Modelling Supports Human Planning and Reasoning

This is Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy

Independent, moderated, timely, deep, gentle, clinical, global, and community conversations about things that matter.  Breathe Easy, we go deep and lightly surface the big ideas.

Support the show

Disclosure: This podcast uses AI-generated synthetic voices for a material portion of the audio content, in line with Apple Podcasts guidelines.

We make rigorous science accessible, accurate, and unforgettable.

Produced by Michelle Bruecker and Scott Bleackley, it features reviews of emerging research and ideas from leading thinkers, curated under our creative direction with AI assistance for voice, imagery, and composition. Systemic voices and illustrative images of people are representative tools, not depictions of specific individuals.

We dive deep into peer-reviewed research, pre-prints, and major scientific works—then bring them to life through the stories of the researchers themselves. Complex ideas become clear. Obscure discoveries become conversation starters. And you walk away understanding not just what scientists discovered, but why it matters and how they got there.

Independent, moderated, timely, deep, gentle, clinical, global, and community conversations about things that matter. Breathe Easy, we go deep and lightly surface the big ideas.

Spoken word, short and sweet, with rhythm and a catchy beat.
http://tinyurl.com/stonefolksongs