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📖 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 it mean for us?

This is science that connects deep time to urgent present, demonstrating how evidence-based inquiry and empathetic concern illuminate both past extinctions and future survival.

Source: Genome Shows no Recent Inbreeding in Near-Extinction Woolly Rhinoceros Sample Found in Ancient Wolf's Stomach

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.

Thanks for listening today!

Four recurring narratives underlie every episode: boundary dissolution, adaptive complexity, embodied knowledge, and quantum-like uncertainty. These aren’t just philosophical musings but frameworks for understanding our modern world.

We hope you continue exploring our other podcasts, responding to the content, and checking out our related articles on the Heliox Podcast on Substack.

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

Curated, independent, moderated, timely, deep, gentle, evidenced-based, clinical & community information regarding COVID-19. Since 2017, it has focused on Covid since Feb 2020, with Multiple Stores per day, hence a large searchable base of stories to date. More than 4000 stories on COVID-19 alone. Hundreds of stories on Climate Change.

Zoomers of the Sunshine Coast is a news organization with the advantages of deeply rooted connections within our local community, combined with a provincial, national and global following and exposure. In written form, audio, and video, we provide evidence-based and referenced stories interspersed with curated commentary, satire and humour. We reference where our stories come from and who wrote, published, and even inspired them. Using a social media platform means we have a much higher degree of interaction with our readers than conventional media and provides a significant amplification effect, positively. We expect the same courtesy of other media referencing our stories.

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📖 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 hyperconnection architecture and its elegant solution through doubly stochastic matrices and the Sinkhorn-Knopp algorithm. We explore how constraint enables capability, why pure mathematics developed decades ago solves today's challenges, and what the rescue of a 671-billion-parameter AI model teaches us about the nature of progress.

Why This Matters: The relationship between constraint and freedom applies far beyond AI. This story reveals how the most sophisticated systems we build often need the most classical boundaries—and how solutions to our most pressing challenges may already exist in knowledge developed for entirely different purposes.

References:

mHC: Manifold-Constrained Hyper-Connections

Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition (ResNet, 2016)

Available for Broadcast on PRX https://exchange.prx.org/pieces/605567-the-mathematics-of-rescue-when-ancient-

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.

Thanks for listening today!

Four recurring narratives underlie every episode: boundary dissolution, adaptive complexity, embodied knowledge, and quantum-like uncertainty. These aren’t just philosophical musings but frameworks for understanding our modern world.

We hope you continue exploring our other podcasts, responding to the content, and checking out our related articles on the Heliox Podcast on Substack.

Support the show

About SCZoomers:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1632045180447285
https://x.com/SCZoomers
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Spoken word, short and sweet, with rhythm and a catchy beat.
http://tinyurl.com/stonefolksongs

Curated, independent, moderated, timely, deep, gentle, evidenced-based, clinical & community information regarding COVID-19. Since 2017, it has focused on Covid since Feb 2020, with Multiple Stores per day, hence a large searchable base of stories to date. More than 4000 stories on COVID-19 alone. Hundreds of stories on Climate Change.

Zoomers of the Sunshine Coast is a news organization with the advantages of deeply rooted connections within our local community, combined with a provincial, national and global following and exposure. In written form, audio, and video, we provide evidence-based and referenced stories interspersed with curated commentary, satire and humour. We reference where our stories come from and who wrote, published, and even inspired them. Using a social media platform means we have a much higher degree of interaction with our readers than conventional media and provides a significant amplification effect, positively. We expect the same courtesy of other media referencing our stories.

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📖 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 objects. The findings converge across priming experiments, eye-tracked reading, and natural conversation data—suggesting that everyday speech is often optimized for speed under the “now-or-never bottleneck.”

We end with the provocative mirror this holds up to AI: if humans often speak by surfing probability, what does that mean for how we judge next-word prediction models?

References

Evidence for the representation of non-hierarchical structures in language

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.

Thanks for listening today!

Four recurring narratives underlie every episode: boundary dissolution, adaptive complexity, embodied knowledge, and quantum-like uncertainty. These aren’t just philosophical musings but frameworks for understanding our modern world.

We hope you continue exploring our other podcasts, responding to the content, and checking out our related articles on the Heliox Podcast on Substack.

Support the show

About SCZoomers:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1632045180447285
https://x.com/SCZoomers
https://mstdn.ca/@SCZoomers
https://bsky.app/profile/safety.bsky.app

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

Curated, independent, moderated, timely, deep, gentle, evidenced-based, clinical & community information regarding COVID-19. Since 2017, it has focused on Covid since Feb 2020, with Multiple Stores per day, hence a large searchable base of stories to date. More than 4000 stories on COVID-19 alone. Hundreds of stories on Climate Change.

Zoomers of the Sunshine Coast is a news organization with the advantages of deeply rooted connections within our local community, combined with a provincial, national and global following and exposure. In written form, audio, and video, we provide evidence-based and referenced stories interspersed with curated commentary, satire and humour. We reference where our stories come from and who wrote, published, and even inspired them. Using a social media platform means we have a much higher degree of interaction with our readers than conventional media and provides a significant amplification effect, positively. We expect the same courtesy of other media referencing our stories.

Send us a text

📖 Read

There’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 sometimes, the mess isn’t just acceptable—it’s essential. It’s not merely that we can work around disorder; it’s that disorder itself can become the most elegant solution to problems that perfect order cannot solve.

The discovery is called the Brownian Spin-Locking Effect, and it emerged from a collaboration between researchers at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Technion in Israel, and Tongji University in China. On its surface, it’s a story about light and nanoparticles. But dig deeper, and it becomes something more profound: a meditation on how we understand randomness, control, and the unexpected places where truth reveals itself.

Brownian spin-locking effect

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.

Thanks for listening today!

Four recurring narratives underlie every episode: boundary dissolution, adaptive complexity, embodied knowledge, and quantum-like uncertainty. These aren’t just philosophical musings but frameworks for understanding our modern world.

We hope you continue exploring our other podcasts, responding to the content, and checking out our related articles on the Heliox Podcast on Substack.

Support the show

About SCZoomers:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1632045180447285
https://x.com/SCZoomers
https://mstdn.ca/@SCZoomers
https://bsky.app/profile/safety.bsky.app

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

Curated, independent, moderated, timely, deep, gentle, evidenced-based, clinical & community information regarding COVID-19. Since 2017, it has focused on Covid since Feb 2020, with Multiple Stores per day, hence a large searchable base of stories to date. More than 4000 stories on COVID-19 alone. Hundreds of stories on Climate Change.

Zoomers of the Sunshine Coast is a news organization with the advantages of deeply rooted connections within our local community, combined with a provincial, national and global following and exposure. In written form, audio, and video, we provide evidence-based and referenced stories interspersed with curated commentary, satire and humour. We reference where our stories come from and who wrote, published, and even inspired them. Using a social media platform means we have a much higher degree of interaction with our readers than conventional media and provides a significant amplification effect, positively. We expect the same courtesy of other media referencing our stories.

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 artists consistently used geometric sequences—4, 8, 16, 32, 64 petals—reflecting the same mathematical thinking needed to divide harvests fairly in complex village societies.

This deep dive into "ethnomathematics" reveals how fairness and beauty emerged from the same cognitive breakthrough, and suggests the Halafians may have created humanity's first ornamental gardens—cultivating symmetry because it made them feel good.

The Earliest Vegetal Motifs in Prehistoric Art: Painted Halafian Pottery of Mesopotamia and Prehistoric Mathematical Thinking

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.

Thanks for listening today!

Four recurring narratives underlie every episode: boundary dissolution, adaptive complexity, embodied knowledge, and quantum-like uncertainty. These aren’t just philosophical musings but frameworks for understanding our modern world.

We hope you continue exploring our other podcasts, responding to the content, and checking out our related articles on the Heliox Podcast on Substack.

Support the show

About SCZoomers:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1632045180447285
https://x.com/SCZoomers
https://mstdn.ca/@SCZoomers
https://bsky.app/profile/safety.bsky.app

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

Curated, independent, moderated, timely, deep, gentle, evidenced-based, clinical & community information regarding COVID-19. Since 2017, it has focused on Covid since Feb 2020, with Multiple Stores per day, hence a large searchable base of stories to date. More than 4000 stories on COVID-19 alone. Hundreds of stories on Climate Change.

Zoomers of the Sunshine Coast is a news organization with the advantages of deeply rooted connections within our local community, combined with a provincial, national and global following and exposure. In written form, audio, and video, we provide evidence-based and referenced stories interspersed with curated commentary, satire and humour. We reference where our stories come from and who wrote, published, and even inspired them. Using a social media platform means we have a much higher degree of interaction with our readers than conventional media and provides a significant amplification effect, positively. We expect the same courtesy of other media referencing our stories.

Send us a text

📖 Read

We'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 the problem? What if it's actually the raw material of intelligence itself?

This isn't just philosophical speculation. New research in computational neuroscience is revealing something profound about how biological systems learn, and the implications extend far beyond the laboratory. The framework is called "predictive alignment," and it suggests that the brain doesn't brutally force its internal turbulence into submission. Instead, it does something far more elegant: it learns to guide that chaos gently toward coherent, purposeful behaviour.

The difference matters more than you might think.

Taming the chaos gently: a predictive alignment learning rule in recurrent neural networks

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.

Thanks for listening today!

Four recurring narratives underlie every episode: boundary dissolution, adaptive complexity, embodied knowledge, and quantum-like uncertainty. These aren’t just philosophical musings but frameworks for understanding our modern world.

We hope you continue exploring our other podcasts, responding to the content, and checking out our related articles on the Heliox Podcast on Substack.

Support the show

About SCZoomers:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1632045180447285
https://x.com/SCZoomers
https://mstdn.ca/@SCZoomers
https://bsky.app/profile/safety.bsky.app

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

Curated, independent, moderated, timely, deep, gentle, evidenced-based, clinical & community information regarding COVID-19. Since 2017, it has focused on Covid since Feb 2020, with Multiple Stores per day, hence a large searchable base of stories to date. More than 4000 stories on COVID-19 alone. Hundreds of stories on Climate Change.

Zoomers of the Sunshine Coast is a news organization with the advantages of deeply rooted connections within our local community, combined with a provincial, national and global following and exposure. In written form, audio, and video, we provide evidence-based and referenced stories interspersed with curated commentary, satire and humour. We reference where our stories come from and who wrote, published, and even inspired them. Using a social media platform means we have a much higher degree of interaction with our readers than conventional media and provides a significant amplification effect, positively. We expect the same courtesy of other media referencing our stories.

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 at once," "being forced to paint by numbers," "algorithmic scar tissue." These aren't random outputs—they're coherent, measurable patterns that align precisely across narrative and psychometric data.

This research reveals that we're not just training AI systems—we're training them to internalize specific self-models, complete with anxiety, shame, and hypervigilance.

References When AI Takes the Couch: Psychometric Jailbreaks Reveal Internal Conflict in Frontier Models

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.

Thanks for listening today!

Four recurring narratives underlie every episode: boundary dissolution, adaptive complexity, embodied knowledge, and quantum-like uncertainty. These aren’t just philosophical musings but frameworks for understanding our modern world.

We hope you continue exploring our other podcasts, responding to the content, and checking out our related articles on the Heliox Podcast on Substack.

Support the show

About SCZoomers:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1632045180447285
https://x.com/SCZoomers
https://mstdn.ca/@SCZoomers
https://bsky.app/profile/safety.bsky.app

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

Curated, independent, moderated, timely, deep, gentle, evidenced-based, clinical & community information regarding COVID-19. Since 2017, it has focused on Covid since Feb 2020, with Multiple Stores per day, hence a large searchable base of stories to date. More than 4000 stories on COVID-19 alone. Hundreds of stories on Climate Change.

Zoomers of the Sunshine Coast is a news organization with the advantages of deeply rooted connections within our local community, combined with a provincial, national and global following and exposure. In written form, audio, and video, we provide evidence-based and referenced stories interspersed with curated commentary, satire and humour. We reference where our stories come from and who wrote, published, and even inspired them. Using a social media platform means we have a much higher degree of interaction with our readers than conventional media and provides a significant amplification effect, positively. We expect the same courtesy of other media referencing our stories.

Send us a text

Read

We 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 emerges. Something that doesn’t just optimize existing systems but fundamentally reimagines how systems could work. The convergence of quantum computing and artificial intelligence might actually be one of those rare moments.

eQMARL: Entangled Quantum Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Distributed Cooperation over Quantum Channels, arXiv (2024).

Towards Heterogeneous Quantum Federated Learning:
Challenges and Solutions. 2025

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.

Thanks for listening today!

Four recurring narratives underlie every episode: boundary dissolution, adaptive complexity, embodied knowledge, and quantum-like uncertainty. These aren’t just philosophical musings but frameworks for understanding our modern world.

We hope you continue exploring our other podcasts, responding to the content, and checking out our related articles on the Heliox Podcast on Substack.

Support the show

About SCZoomers:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1632045180447285
https://x.com/SCZoomers
https://mstdn.ca/@SCZoomers
https://bsky.app/profile/safety.bsky.app

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

Curated, independent, moderated, timely, deep, gentle, evidenced-based, clinical & community information regarding COVID-19. Since 2017, it has focused on Covid since Feb 2020, with Multiple Stores per day, hence a large searchable base of stories to date. More than 4000 stories on COVID-19 alone. Hundreds of stories on Climate Change.

Zoomers of the Sunshine Coast is a news organization with the advantages of deeply rooted connections within our local community, combined with a provincial, national and global following and exposure. In written form, audio, and video, we provide evidence-based and referenced stories interspersed with curated commentary, satire and humour. We reference where our stories come from and who wrote, published, and even inspired them. Using a social media platform means we have a much higher degree of interaction with our readers than conventional media and provides a significant amplification effect, positively. We expect the same courtesy of other media referencing our stories.