A businessman has revealed plans to colonize the Moon by 2063 and transform humanity into a "multiplanet species." Guillermo Sohnlein told The Independent that we would "begin to see ourselves not just as citizens of one country or another but as inhabitants of Mearth," a hypothetical Earth-Moon civilization. 

What did the commentators say? 
Sohnlein, the Argentine-American co-founder of the Titan submersible company, hopes to have a basic hut on the lunar surface by 2031, according to his Project Moon Hut initiative. By 2063, with the trade flow with the Earth "normalized," there would be a "thriving community" of 1,644 people living and working in an environment "once thought to be uninhabitable." 

NASA has a similar timeline. The agency believes that by 2040 Americans will "build houses on the Moon," said The New York Times, using "specialized lunar concrete created from the rock chips, mineral fragments and dust" on the natural satellite's surface and constructed with the help of 3D printers. 

The immediate needs would be breathable air, water, food, pressurized shelter and power. Sourcing as many resources as possible from the Moon would be "ideal," said How Stuff Works, because the cost of shipping material from Earth is "unbelievable" — about $50,000 per pound. Aidan Cowley, a scientific adviser at Esa's European Astronaut Center, told the BBC that although the Moon has no "vegetation, food or running water," it does have some "mineral resources, sunlight and water ice." Experiments in the International Space Station have shown that plants can be grown in microgravity, and the University of Florida recently discovered that garden cress can grow in lunar soil. 

What next? 
Contracts have already been signed between space agencies and industry for "long-term lunar infrastructure missions," said the BBC. Communications and navigation services are being devised and plans drawn up for water extraction from lunar ice and electricity from solar power plants. 

Nokia is testing the Moon's first 4G network, sending out a rover to "see if it can pick a wireless signal," said The Telegraph, while lunar Wi-Fi is "just around the corner." And "wrapped into NASA’s push to build on the Moon," said The New York Times, is a "longer and even more far-flung goal: getting to Mars."

A new research paper reveals that scientists have mapped the three-dimensional architecture of a woolly mammoth's genome using fossilized remains. This marks the first time science has fully replicated the DNA of an ancient animal from a fossil.

The paper, published July 11 in the journal Cell, is the culmination of a six-year study by an international community of scientists. The completion of the genome mapping represents a "new kind of fossil, a fossil chromosome," said Erez Lieberman Aiden, one of the co-authors of the study, to The New York Times. 

What did the scientists do?
The fossilized remains were from a 52,000-year-old woolly mammoth found in remote Siberia. It was "impeccably freeze-dried by nature, its swatches of fur remaining intact," said The Washington Post. As a result, the mammoth "entered a dehydrated state shortly after death, protecting it from being colonized by fungi and bacteria."

Using a swatch of fur, scientists "studied a small skin sample," said the Post. During an examination of the hair follicles, it was discovered that the "chromosomes in each cell were still organized into clear territories, giving experts insight into which genes were switched on and off while the mammoth was alive."

With this insight, scientists extracted DNA and reconstructed the extinct creature's entire genome. This was not an easy task, as the mammoth's genome has more than 4 billion base pairs of DNA. The human genome has only 3 billion. 

Future applications
The discovery "opens up major new possibilities of exploring the biology of extinct species," Adrian Lister, a paleontologist, said to Scientific American. Similar genetic information could now be collected from other fossilized remains. 

The "widespread use of the technique could generate more precise ancient genomes and allow analysis of new species," Juan Rodríguez, a study co-author, said to Scientific American. Putting together ancient DNA often requires a lot of guesswork, but the "new 3D structural analysis bypasses these obstacles," meaning that "future work could flesh out evolutionary trees" or "examine how organisms adapted to their changing environments, producing insights for modern conservation efforts."