When an LLM answers a question, is it reasoning like humans, or just producing text that looks like reasoning? The distinction isn’t just philosophical, this determines what we can trust AI to do, how closely we need to supervise it, and ultimately what its real-world impact will turn out to be. Melanie Mitchell at the Santa Fe Institute argues that we lack adequate methods for measuring machine cognition, and that AI is a form of “alien intelligence” that operates through non-human cognitive mechanisms. In this episode of The Joy of Why, Mitchell tells Steven Strogatz how methods that psychologists use to study cognition in other kinds of “alien intelligence” — babies and animals — can be adapted to probe AI, and she lays out six principles for better assessing machine cognition. Their conversation ranges from the challenge of interpreting what’s happening inside these systems, to recent AI-assisted breakthroughs in mathematics, to why a math-performing horse from the early 1900s offers a cautionary tale for how we assess intelligence.

Pain and pleasure seem like simple facts of life, but they are far from it. Neuroscientists still cannot say why physical pain differs from psychological pain, for instance, nor why a loved one’s touch soothes while a stranger’s touch repels. To explore the science behind these sensations, Janna Levin talked to Ishmail Abdus-Saboor, a neuroscientist at Columbia University’s Zuckerman Institute. Their conversation covers how pain serves an evolutionary purpose, how researchers measure pain and pleasure in the lab despite the absence of any objective biomarker, and how touch functions as a social and emotional signal, not just a sensory one. Abdus-Saboor also describes his work with naked mole rats — a species that barely feels pain, shows no signs of aging, and lives in colonies built almost entirely on touch — and the ethical trade-offs when studying sensations in animals that cannot describe what they feel.

One of the biggest mysteries in cosmology seems to keep getting bigger. Astronomers have known since the 1930s that the universe is expanding, but in the 1990s, the discovery that this expansion is accelerating rather than slowing down came as a huge shock to the field. Something had to be driving that acceleration, and dark energy was proposed as the cause. What began as a seismic shock in cosmology eventually led to a Nobel prize. But this story has a sequel, and it comes with another major plot twist. The two main methods for estimating the universe's present-day expansion rate are producing significantly different answers. As a result, how fast the universe is really expanding has become a matter of considerable debate — with no small amount of angst — and the discrepancy has become known as the Hubble tension. Perhaps most surprising of all is that one of the loudest voices raising concern is Adam Riess, the astrophysicist whose Nobel Prize-winning work helped ignite the acceleration debate in the first place. Riess joined co-host Steven Strogatz on The Joy of Why to explain how we got to this point, what the Hubble tension might be telling us, and what may happen next.

Does intelligent life exist elsewhere in the universe? The question has captivated us for centuries, but despite decades of searching it remains frustratingly unanswered. Every so often a curious signal appears — fossilized structures in a meteorite, say, or an unusual gas in an exoplanet’s atmosphere — and for a moment it seems possible that we are not alone before the excitement gives way to a more mundane explanation.  So what would it actually take to find life in the cosmos — and how would we know when we saw it? David Kipping, an astronomer at Columbia University, has spent his career finding better ways to answer these questions. His approach is statistical: rather than chasing individual detections, he develops mathematical frameworks for reasoning about where habitable worlds are likely to exist and how confidently we can interpret the signals they produce. In this episode of The Joy of Why, Kipping joins co-host Janna Levin to discuss efforts to frame one of humanity’s oldest existential questions as a tractable scientific problem, why biosignatures have proved so difficult to interpret, and why he believes exomoons may be an overlooked place to search for life.

What links certain mathematical models of traffic flow, shallow-water waves, and quantum particle scattering? The surprising answer lies in a corner of the algebraic combinatorics world that goes by the name of positive Grassmannian. In simple terms, the positive Grassmannian is a shape that classifies other shapes. Remarkably, pieces of the positive Grassmannian can be reassembled in forms that reveal shared structures in these and many other seemingly unrelated mathematical systems. That we know the positive Grassmannian crops up in many real-world settings is largely down to the theoretical work of Lauren Williams at Harvard University. In this latest episode of The Joy of Why, Williams talks to co-host Steven Strogatz about her work, how she realized the surprising pervasiveness of the positive Grassmannian, and how she has made a career of finding connections among fields that don’t at first sight seem connected. The conversation then switches to another project Williams is working on, called First Proof, which is trying to measure objectively how good AI systems are at coming up with proofs of research-level mathematical statements, and which leads to an exploration of whether AI may or may not take over mathematics. Note: Since this conversation was recorded, results from the First Proof Second Batch project were released on June 10, 2026.

One of the most surprising and remarkable discoveries in recent scientific history has been CRISPR. Short for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, CRISPR is a form of immune system that evolved in bacteria more than a billion years ago to defend against persistent viral threats. Under attack, bacteria can snip a small fragment of a virus’s DNA, store it in the CRISPR region of their genome, and then use it to recognize and destroy the same virus if it returns. The CRISPR-Cas9 system, to give it its longer name, consists of a short strand of guide RNA that identifies where to cut the DNA and a protein that acts as the molecular scissors. What made this system truly revolutionary was the demonstration in 2012 that it could be reprogrammed with different pieces of guide RNA to edit virtually any genome in any species, and at a level of precision and ease that far surpassed existing gene-editing tools. Since then, the editing capability of CRISPR has been tested on everything from developing disease treatments to engineering drought-resistant crops to resurrecting genes of extinct species. The possibilities have expanded so rapidly that researchers, ethicists, and regulators have found themselves struggling to keep up. One person acutely aware of the power of CRISPR is Jennifer Doudna, co-developer of the technology. Doudna, who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020 with Emmanuelle Charpentier for this pioneering work, has been a prominent voice not only for its vast potential but also for its responsible and ethical use. In this episode of The Joy of Why, Doudna tells co-host Janna Levin how her early, “rebellious,” decision to study RNA led her on a serendipitous path to one of biology’s most transformative discoveries. They also discuss the breakthroughs, barriers, and frontiers that will define CRISPR’s true impact.

What is the future of gene editing with CRISPR? Has AI changed mathematics forever? Will we find other civilizations in the universe? What if we’ve been wrong about dark energy all along? These are just a few of the big, bold questions we’ll be exploring in the new season of The Joy of Why. Mathematician Steven Strogatz and physicist Janna Levin are back as your hosts for these and other conversations that explore the frontiers of basic science and mathematics. Each episode features an in-depth conversation in which Steven or Janna sits down with a leading scientist or mathematician to unpack one big idea or area of research. The two hosts also chat together throughout each episode, sharing their own thoughts, reactions, and questions. New episodes drop every other Thursday, kicking off on June 11 with biochemist and Nobel Laureate Jennifer Doudna, who helped revolutionize gene editing and biology as co-discoverer of the CRISPR-Cas9 system. The wide-ranging conversation explores the discovery and sudden rise of CRISPR as a tool that can modify genes in a highly precise manner, the successes and issues the work raised, and what comes next. All 12 episodes of Season 5 will be available to stream or read here, and on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, TuneIn, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Birds are not merely descendants of dinosaurs — they are dinosaurs. For Yale evolutionary biologist and ornithologist Richard Prum, birds have been a lifelong passion and a window into some of evolution’s most intriguing mysteries. In a wide-ranging conversation with co-host Janna Levin, Prum traces the deep evolutionary origins of feathers, which he argues first emerged not for flight but for insulation, camouflage and display. Their colors — often invisible to the human eye — come into sharp focus under birds’ ultraviolet vision, suggesting a sensory world far richer than our own. Prum also explains why he champions Darwin’s once-marginalized theory of sexual selection, which proposes that traits such as the peacock’s tail evolved not for survival, but simply because they were attractive. Beauty, in other words, may shape life as powerfully as utility.

Every time data travels — from smartphones to the cloud, or across the vacuum of space — it relies on a silent but vigilant guardian in the form of error-correcting codes. These codes, baked into nearly every digital system, are designed to detect and repair any errors that noise, interference or cosmic rays might inflict. In this episode of The Joy of Why, Stanford computer scientist Mary Wootters joins co-host Steven Strogatz to explain how these codes work, and why they matter more than ever. Wootters discusses the evolving list of codes that keep modern communication resilient, and the frontiers in which error correction may have a crucial role, including distributed cloud systems, quantum computing and even DNA-based data storage.

Most cosmologists agree that our universe had a beginning. But the finer details about the Big Bang remain a mystery. A history of everything would explain all, or so theoretical physicists hoped. In his final years, Stephen Hawking working with Thomas Hertog proposed a striking idea: The laws of physics were not precisely determined before the Big Bang; they evolved as the universe evolved.  In this episode of The Joy of Why, Hertog speaks with co-host Janna Levin about his work and partnership with Hawking. Hertog, now at KU Leuven in Belgium, explains why they rejected the popular multiverse theory and instead explored the idea that the universe’s properties are a result of cosmological natural selection. According to Hertog and Hawking, these properties must be viewed through the lens of human observers, who are also the consequence of natural selection. So, how could the universe have created the conditions needed for life to emerge? Listen to the episode below to find out.