As The Joy of Why podcast returns for a second season, producer Polly Stryker and host Steven Strogatz invite listeners to join them and their brilliant new guests on another voyage of discovery.

Type Ia supernovas are astronomers’ best tools for measuring cosmic distances. In a first, researchers have managed to re-create one on a supercomputer, giving a boost to a leading hypothesis for how they form.

“Liquid” neural nets, based on a worm’s nervous system, can transform their underlying algorithms on the fly, giving them unprecedented speed and adaptability.

Richard Feynman’s path integral is both a powerful prediction machine and a philosophy about how the world is. But physicists are still struggling to figure out how to use it, and what it means.

A new proof shows that a knot some thought would contradict the famed slice-ribbon conjecture doesn’t.

A wave of research improves reinforcement learning algorithms by pre-training them as if they were human.

The critical brain hypothesis suggests that neural networks do their best work when connections are not too weak or too strong.

Theory has it that “Population III” stars brought light to the cosmos. The James Webb Space Telescope may have just glimpsed them.

Two teams have made photons act as if time were simultaneously flowing in two directions. The experiments demonstrate a way to potentially boost the performance of quantum devices.