Welcome to Sunday. The most-read stories of the week are displayed below. Below that is a collection of editors’ selections that we want to make sure you don’t miss.

You can also get the most-read stories in a magazine-style e-book.

My family often debates whether we should turn off the air conditioning when we leave the house. Will that save us money and help the planet – or is cooling down a hot house more energy-intensive than maintaining an already cooled one? Apparently, we aren’t the only ones asking. This week an article crunching the numbers attracted more than 2 million readers. It was a great first Conversation piece from a team of architectural and building systems engineers at the University of Colorado Boulder – Aisling Pigott, Jennifer Scheib and Kyri Baker.

Readers were also eager to learn about a new study that shows how one class of “forever chemicals” can be broken down into mostly harmless components. Daniel Jones and Hui Li of Michigan State explained the breakthrough as well as other ways engineers and scientists are trying to collect, contain and destroy these pervasive chemicals linked to human disease.

If you’re waiting for the second episode of HBO’s “House of the Dragon” to drop on Monday evening, you’ll enjoy one of our editors’ picks this week, which explores the cultural history of dragons. “Across the vast majority of religions,” writes Emily Zarka, a scholar of monsters at Arizona State University, “there is mythic trope some scholars call Chaoskampf, a German word that translates as struggle against chaos.”

Also planned for Monday – a launch of the Artemis mission that will test the safety of a crew capsule designed to carry humans back to the moon. Jack Burns, a space scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder, explains the importance of the mission.

Next week, we’ll bring you stories about clean energy jobs, what makes lawmakers effective in Congress and how Mary Kay furthered feminism.