Send us a text Read the article on Substack 11 million children in the U.S. are growing up with a parent with alcohol use disorder. Many will carry that trauma into adulthood—often repeating the same patterns. In this episode, we explore: 🧠 Why adult children of alcoholics are 4x more likely to develop their own AUD 🧠 The neurobiology of trauma: How early stress rewires the brain's stress response and reward systems 🧠 The PTSD-addiction connection: 50% of addiction treatment clien...

Send us a text Please take a look at the corresponding Substack episode. We're standing at a peculiar threshold in human history, one where the question isn't whether artificial intelligence will transform our world, but whether we're asking the right questions about that transformation before it's too late. I've been thinking about this a lot lately—not in the breathless, apocalyptic way that dominates so much tech discourse, but in the quieter, more unsettling register of daily erosion. The...

Send us a text 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 we have of it. Having recently watched “Ingress” by Rachel Noll James I realized How the brai...

Send us a text 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 a massive study using genetic data from 2.4 million people that completely dismantles the protecti...

Send us a text 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. The case is closed. The limits are real. We can move on to problems that might actually have solutio...

Send us a text 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 supermarkets, choosing between seventeen varieties of bread. But Preetam Singh knows what that number m...

Send us a text 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, engineering in its own corner. We've convinced ourselves these boundaries are natural, inevitable, perhaps even necessar...

Send us a text 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, a paperweight, depending on what we’re doing with it. But we’ve always assumed this flexibility was...

Send us a text 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've become numb to exponential advances. We nod along when someone says "exponentially faster" as if it's ...

Send us a text 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 medical information, creating chaos around a child's activities—these can all be forms of control disguised as principled sta...

Send us a text 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 about it—sort of—for nearly a century. We weren't paying attention to what it might mean for the women in our lives....

Send us a text 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 simple analyses, it disappeared as a predictor once hand dexterity entered the equation. Brute strength...

Send us a text 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, carefully removing blocks and hoping our health doesn't fall apart. But what if the most effective inter...

Send us a text 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-handed, like a novelist who's lost all subtlety. Yet there's also something oddly comforting about this d...

Send us a text 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 creates a consistent, accessible view of our entire planet's surface. Not just snapshots. Not just fragments. But a continuo...

Send us a text 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 instincts are being manipulated and when the costs of inaction exceed even the highest price of punishment. In...

Send us a text 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 laboratory where scientists managed to keep a quantum computer running for two hours straight. Two hours doesn't ...

Send us a text 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. The numbers don't lie. But the people who interpret them for public consumption certainly do. Thirty-six per...

Send us a text 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, researchers took immune cells from people who had recovered from COVID-19—not just any cells, but the specializ...

Send us a text 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 works like this: More energy per person → Larger institutionsLarger institutions → Deeper hierarchiesDeeper hierarchies → Expone...