This is Science Friday. I'm John Dankoski. Ira Flato is away. Later this hour, we'll be talking about

urban evolution, how species have adapted to life in the big city. But first, one adaptation that humans

have had to make the summer is to rising temperatures. Across the globe and the northern hemisphere,

heat waves have been common in the summer. Even the Arctic is at all-time highs. Joining me now to talk about that and other stories from the week in science is Tanya Basu, Senior Editor for Science at the Daily Beast. She's right here in our New York studios. Welcome back to the show. Thank you. Let's start talking about this heat wave. It's not surprising, of course, that we've got a lot of hot weather. Where's it really bad right now? It's really bad, I would say, all over the place. You know, there's been a lot of deaths in Japan. Japan has had, you know, temperatures go up to 100 degrees, 108 degrees. Greece, there's wildfires, and now it's hitting the Arctic. We're hitting a lot of the Scandinavian countries that usually don't go over 80 degrees and are going closer to 90, which means that there are forest fires that are just raging there, and they don't know how to deal with it because they've never had forest fires before. Yeah, very high temperatures in Quebec and other places that we're not expecting high temperatures. Now, are all these events connected and are they connected to climate change? Yeah, so definitely climate change is playing a role.

There's also the fact that jet streams are very slow right now and there's a little bit of atmospheric pressure just, you know, hanging out, which means that these forest fires are able to spread more.

So all these forest fires, although they're in different regions around the world, are connected. And climate change plays a big role.

Okay, let's move on and let's move to the moon, specifically the ancient moon, and whether or not

there was water on the moon way back when. Yeah, so there were two periods the scientists were

looking at. One was four billion years ago, another was 500 million years ago, which is very

recent, considering that life on Earth began 3.7 billion

years ago, and that means that there could have been water vapor that existed on the moon

that could have supported microbial life at the same time that we were here on Earth.

Yeah, that's amazing.

So where would this water have come from, do you think?

So it probably came from underground.

You know, there were a lot of volcanic activity going on at that time, and so there could

have been things in water in addition to other things coming out from the moon that could

have been able to support, you know, very, very basic creatures.

Very basic creatures, very tiny creatures, not big ones.

No, very, very tiny ones.

I want to move on to some creatures that have been

adapting. A story about lizards and really rapid adaptation. This is fascinating. This is such a

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