Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy 🇨🇦‬

Send us Fan Mail Please see our corresponding Substack "Between, between" ( a Halloween-appropriate song )  3:32 An introspective pop anthem of changes in  our world and our perception at this time of year, vanquished by a cold ocean swim On CBC Early Edition in Vancouver, Stephen Quinn lost his voice this morning… which got me thinking about the origins of Halloween and the exceptions w...

Send us Fan Mail Read the article on Substack For decades, the message seemed clear: a little alcohol might protect your brain. The famous U-shaped curve suggested light drinkers were safer than both heavy drinkers and non-drinkers when it came to dementia risk. But what if this reassuring narrative was built on a fundamental misreading of the science? In this paradigm-shifting episode, we explore...

Send us Fan Mail Please see the corresponding Substack episode When the orthodoxy says “it can’t be done,” someone inevitably proves them wrong—but only if they’re willing to fail fast, think sideways, and trust the data over doctrine. There’s a peculiar comfort in impossibility. When experts across an entire field agree that something fundamentally cannot work, we get to stop worrying about it. T...

Send us Fan Mail Read article on Substack Nobody thinks about wheat until there isn’t any. This is how empires crumble, how revolutions spark, how the comfortable illusion of stability shatters like kernels too heat-stressed to fill. We scroll past headlines about heat waves in Horeana, India—127 degrees Fahrenheit, we read, a number that doesn’t compute when we’re standing in air-conditioned supe...

Send us Fan Mail Please see our corresponding Substack episode We taught cells to build their own quantum sensors. Evolution just became a tool for quantum engineering. Nature had the answer all along. There's something profoundly unsettling about the way we've organized knowledge. We've spent centuries building walls between disciplines—physics over here, biology over there, engine...

Send us Fan Mail Read article on Substack These dogs built mental filing systems where “things you pull” and “things you throw” became umbrella categories so robust they reorganized the dogs’ understanding of their entire toy collection. Function trumped identity. We do this too, of course. We reorganize our mental maps constantly based on use-context. The same object can be a doorstop, a weapon,...

Send us Fan Mail Please take a look at the corresponding Substack episode. There's a moment in the quantum computing story that should make us all stop and stare at our coffee cups. A classical computer would need 20 million years to accomplish what a quantum system did in 15 minutes. Not twenty years. Not twenty thousand. Twenty million . Let me sit with that number for a moment, because we&...

Send us Fan Mail Read the article on Substack There's a psychological concept called "coercive control" that helps explain what happened here. It's the use of tactics designed to isolate, intimidate, and dominate another person, often through seemingly mundane interactions. Refusing to communicate about schedule changes, interpreting every gesture as hostile, withholding medica...

Send us Fan Mail Please take a look at the corresponding Substack episode. We've been looking in the wrong direction. While cardiologists scrutinize cholesterol panels and blood pressure readings, while researchers parse genetic markers and lifestyle factors, something vast and invisible has been influencing heart attack risk all along. It's 93 million miles away, and we've known ab...

Send us Fan Mail Read the article on Substack We are not minds that happen to have bodies—we are integrated systems where every movement carries information, every gesture contains intelligence, every stumble might be a prophecy. The researchers noted something else troubling: while grip strength—that macho measure of vitality we love to test at carnivals—showed associations with cognition in simp...

Send us Fan Mail Please take a look at the corresponding Substack episode. The future of health might be less about restriction and more about strategic abundance We've been having the wrong conversation about food. For decades, the debate has endlessly revolved around what we should eliminate—meat, dairy, carbs, fat, gluten, sugar.  We've turned eating into a game of nutritional Jenga,...

Send us Fan Mail Read the article on Substack The precision of this dating technique creates a kind of temporal vertigo. We're looking at eggs laid during a specific geological moment when climate change was reshaping the planet, when species were adapting and migrating and ultimately preparing—unknowingly—for extinction. The parallels to our own moment are so obvious they feel almost heavy-h...

Send us Fan Mail Please see the corresponding Substack for more information We've been trying to see our planet clearly for decades now, and we're still not very good at it. That's the uncomfortable truth behind Google DeepMind's recent release of AlphaEarth Foundations. This foundational AI model does something we desperately need but haven't quite managed to achieve: it...

Send us Fan Mail Read the article on Substack The neuroscience of altruistic punishment reveals both our greatest hope and our deepest vulnerability. We are capable of extraordinary self-sacrifice in service of justice, but that same capacity can be exploited, misdirected, or suppressed. Understanding these mechanisms won't solve injustice, but it might help us recognize when our moral instin...

Send us Fan Mail Please see the corresponding Substack resource . We've been sold a particular story about progress. It goes something like this: breakthroughs happen suddenly, genius strikes like lightning, and revolution arrives in a single dramatic moment that changes everything overnight. The reality, as usual, is messier and more interesting. Consider what happened recently in a laborato...

Send us Fan Mail Read the article on Substack So instead, we'll continue to normalize the abnormal, to treat a 36% chronic illness rate as just another statistic, to let individuals bear the cost of collective failures. We'll keep moving, keep consuming, keep pretending that the bodies breaking down around us are isolated tragedies rather than predictable outcomes of predictable choices....

Send us Fan Mail Please take a look at our corresponding Substack Episode .   What if your immune system could borrow another person's cellular memories? Today's breakthrough made me cry—cancer patients clearing COVID in days 🧬✨ It’s a question that sounds like science fiction, but the answer is unfolding in real time through a therapy called TVGN489. In a phase one clinical trial, res...

Send us Fan Mail Read the article on Substack Another team of researchers traced the origins of inequality using what they call the "Energy Hierarchy Inequality Hypothesis." They discovered that inequality isn't just a side effect of human greed—it's the predictable result of an ancient algorithm we've been unconsciously following for thousands of years. The algorithm work...

Send us Fan Mail Please see the corresponding Substack episode   How the world's most powerful tech companies are treating AI safety like nuclear physics—and what that means for the rest of us The transformation is remarkable. Just a few years ago, AI safety discussions felt like philosophical thought experiments—distant concerns about robot overlords and science fiction scenarios that belong...

Send us Fan Mail Read the article on Substack As global temperatures continue rising and our collective mood potentially shifts toward persistent negativity, what happens to us? How does chronic heat-induced irritability affect social cohesion? Political stability? Our capacity for the cooperation and empathy we'll desperately need to address climate change itself? There's a dark feedbac...

Send us Fan Mail Please see the corresponding Substack episode How the engineering principles behind massive AI systems reveal timeless truths about cooperation, specialization, and the delicate art of working together There's something almost mystical about watching a thousand chips work in perfect harmony. Each one a specialized genius, none capable of greatness alone, but together creating...

Send us Fan Mail Read the article on Substack Perhaps the most interesting revelation is that there's no statistical support for a single, overarching "general factor of personality"—no master trait that ties everything together. Instead, what emerged is a complex three-tiered hierarchy: 28 specific facets at the base, six broader traits in the middle, and three meta-traits at the t...

Send us Fan Mail See corresponding substack episode How a microscopic invader exposed our dangerous addiction to simple stories We love our neat packages. Lock and key. Good and evil. Us and them. Simple cause, simple effect. It's how we make sense of a world that often refuses to cooperate with our need for clarity. But what happens when reality insists on being messier than our metaphors? T...

Send us Fan Mail Read the article on Substack In today's episode we discuss a research article investigating the impact of long-term musical training on age-related changes in brain activity, specifically during speech-in-noise perception. The study compares older musicians, older non-musicians, and young non-musicians using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure brain connec...

Send us Fan Mail See our corresponding substack. Your job might not exist in 5 years. But here's what will: your ability to adapt, create, and stay human. New episode explores the real future of work. 💼✨ More than half the workforce needs retraining or upskilling. Essentially, yes. The good news is that employers seem to recognize this. 85% say they plan to prioritize upskilling their curre...