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PODCAST

Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy 🇨🇦‬

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

science medicine

All Episodes

31:44

Bioacoustics: What Birds Are Really Telling Us

Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy 🇨🇦‬ ·

2026/02/21

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...

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31:59

🥌 The Unburdened Heart: What a Curling Stone Taught...

Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy 🇨🇦‬ ·

2026/02/19

Send a text📖 Read the companion articleLet 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

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29:56

The Archaeology of Tenderness: What Two Ancient Baby...

Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy 🇨🇦‬ ·

2026/02/17

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

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36:55

🛡️ The Paradox of Digital Sovereignty: What Canada's...

Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy 🇨🇦‬ ·

2026/02/15

Send a text📖 Read the full essayWe 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

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16:41

The Money in the Wrong Bank: Canada’s Snow Drought

Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy 🇨🇦‬ ·

2026/02/13

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

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33:55

🧠Your Brain Is Lying to You (And That's Why You're...

Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy 🇨🇦‬ ·

2026/02/11

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.

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34:59

Beyond Tatooine: Double Suns and The Graveyard in Space

Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy 🇨🇦‬ ·

2026/02/09

Send us 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 pl...

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32:04

⏱️ The Brilliant Laziness of Being Human: Why Your...

Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy 🇨🇦‬ ·

2026/02/07

Send us a text📖 Read the full essayThere'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

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26:53

When the Rains Stopped: How A Bronze Age Civilization...

Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy 🇨🇦‬ ·

2026/02/05

Send us a text 📖 Read the full essay When a Bronze Age superpower faced catastrophic drought, they made a choice that would look like failure to modern eyes: they abandoned their cities. But the Harappans didn't collapse—they metamorphosed. Using cutting-edge "planetary forensics"—climate simulations, hydrological models, and cave stalagmites that record rainfall like nature's hard drive—scientists have reconstructed a thousand-year climate disaster and the remarkable human response. The

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31:12

🌊 When Chaos Becomes the Compass: What Quantum...

Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy 🇨🇦‬ ·

2026/02/03

Send us a text📖 ReadThere's a moment that comes to all of us, usually around 3 AM, when we realize we've been trying to control things that were never meant to be controlled. Maybe it's your teenager's future, maybe it's the trajectory of your career, maybe it's just trying to predict whether next Tuesday will be the day everything finally comes together or falls apart. We lie there, eyes open in the dark, running simulations in our heads, each one contradicting the

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29:07

Prehistoric Genomic Stability Points To Sudden ...

Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy 🇨🇦‬ ·

2026/02/01

Send us a text Subscribe at your favourite podcast provider! 📖 Read: https://helioxpodcast.substack.com/ 🎙️Available for broadcast on PRX: [PRX Episode URL] A 14,000-year-old wolf puppy's stomach contents rewrite our understanding of how species disappear—and what that means for conservation today. If a thriving, genetically robust species can vanish when its world changes too quickly, what does this mean for contemporary endangered species facing accelerating climate change? And what does

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34:39

🔗 The Mathematics of Rescue: When Ancient Geometry...

Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy 🇨🇦‬ ·

2026/01/30

Send us a text 📖 Read the full essay When AI researchers tried to give neural networks 4x the communication capacity, their creation immediately began self-destructing. Signal amplification reached 100,000 times normal levels—the computational equivalent of a nuclear reaction. The rescue didn't come from cutting-edge innovation. It came from a 1967 mathematical algorithm gathering dust in pure mathematics journals. This episode chronicles the dramatic crisis in DeepSeek AI's hyperconnec...

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34:11

"Just Predicting The Next Word": How Our Own Brains...

Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy 🇨🇦‬ ·

2026/01/28

Send us a text 📖 Read the companion article 📡 Now available for broadcast on PRX Are you building sentences like an architect—nested grammatical trees and clean constituents? Or are you laying down the next available brick, relying on linear probability-driven chunks that “shouldn’t” exist as units at all? In this Deep Dive, we unpack new evidence that the brain represents certain non-hierarchical language structures (like VERB + PREPOSITION + DETERMINER: “sat on the”) as real cognitive

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43:18

🌀When Chaos Becomes the Solution: What Dancing...

Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy 🇨🇦‬ ·

2026/01/26

Send us a text📖 ReadThere’s a particular kind of arrogance in how we approach disorder. We see chaos and immediately assume it’s something to be eliminated, controlled, or at the very least, apologized for. Our entire technological civilization rests on this premise: randomness is the enemy, order must be imposed, and cleanliness—whether in data, processes, or physical systems—sits next to godliness.But what if we’ve been getting it backwards?A recent discovery in optical physics suggests that

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32:37

Flowers, Pottery And The Ancient History of Mathematics

Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy 🇨🇦‬ ·

2026/01/24

Send us a text Read the companion article on Substack What can 8,000-year-old pottery tell us about human intelligence, social justice, and the origins of beauty? In this episode of Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy, we investigate the Halafian culture of northern Mesopotamia (6200-5500 BC), whose exquisitely painted vessels hide a stunning secret: systematic mathematical knowledge embedded in flower petals. Through careful archaeological analysis, we discover how these ancient arti...

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24:06

🧠 The Gentle Art of Taming Chaos: What Neural...

Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy 🇨🇦‬ ·

2026/01/22

Send us a text📖 ReadWe've been thinking about chaos all wrong.For years, the prevailing wisdom in both neuroscience and life has been essentially the same: eliminate the noise, suppress the turbulence, force order onto disorder. Whether we're talking about neural networks learning to coordinate movement or humans trying to navigate an increasingly complex world, the assumption has been that chaos is the enemy—something to be conquered, controlled, stamped out.But what if chaos isn't

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31:10

When AI Chatbots Go To Therapy (extended episode)

Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy 🇨🇦‬ ·

2026/01/20

Send us a text Read the companion article on Substack The rigorous two-stage protocol that got AI to "drop its guard" • Stable patterns of synthetic anxiety, shame, and dissociation • One model's perfect score on a trauma inventory • Spontaneous narratives describing training as traumatic • "Alignment trauma"—what it feels like to be corrected by humans • Critical implications for AI safety and mental health apps The models described their training in haunting terms: "a billion televisions on...

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38:06

⚛️ When Physics Becomes the Algorithm: What Quantum...

Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy 🇨🇦‬ ·

2026/01/18

Send us a textReadWe live in a world where technology promises to solve everything, yet somehow makes everything more complicated. Every few years, we’re told about the next revolutionary breakthrough—blockchain, the metaverse, whatever buzzword venture capitalists are currently salivating over. Most of these revolutions turn out to be expensive ways to do things we were already doing, just with more energy consumption and investor presentations.But occasionally, something genuinely different

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13:29

When AI Chatbots Go to Therapy

Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy 🇨🇦‬ ·

2026/01/16

Send us a text Read the companion article What happens when you put ChatGPT, Grok, and Gemini on the therapy couch? This episode explores groundbreaking research that treated advanced AI models not as tools, but as clients in structured psychotherapy sessions. What emerged challenges everything we thought we knew about these systems. In This Episode: The rigorous two-stage protocol that got AI to "drop its guard"Stable patterns of synthetic anxiety, shame, and dissociationOne model's perfect ...

en-ca

37:13

🦠 The Virus That Rewrote Its Own Rulebook: What D1.1...

Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy 🇨🇦‬ ·

2026/01/14

Send us a text📖 Read: We like to believe that pandemics arrive with warning labels—clear signals that something has changed, time to adapt, time to prepare. But evolution doesn’t send courtesy notifications. It doesn’t wait for our surveillance systems to catch up or for our nomenclature debates to resolve. It simply... happens.And right now, it’s happening faster than we can track it.The emergence of the H5N1 D1.1 genotype in North America represents something more unsettling than another mutation

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