Welcome to the Saturday edition of The Conversation U.S.’s Daily newsletter.

Following the success of last month’s Artemis II mission, NASA has big aspirations for the Moon. Over the next decade, the agency aims to land on the lunar surface multiple times and eventually set up a base.

When talking about a long-term settlement on the Moon, researchers and industry insiders often use the term “sustainable human presence” – but what exactly does that mean? On Earth, sustainability has strong environmental connotations, but the Moon has no biodiversity. Sustainability can also have an economic component, but there’s no commerce taking place on the Moon – or at least not yet.

An interdisciplinary team of researchers, including Marco A. Janssen, a sustainability professor at Arizona State University; Afreen Siddiqi, an aerospace engineer at MIT; and Parvathy Prem, a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins University, set out to determine what sustainability means in a lunar context. They surveyed academics, industry professionals, government staffers and space enthusiasts about the term and found that definitions differed. They also asked whether the respondents supported human activities, such as building bases on the Moon. According to the authors, getting on the same page about this terminology can improve conversations about activity on the Moon.

“We found that people mean very different things when they talk about lunar sustainability – and those differences often track closely with who they are and where they work,” the authors write.

This week we also liked articles about scientists who trace the evolution of pathogens, the odd arc of a musical founding father’s career, and President Donald Trump’s “revenge tariffs.”

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