There are also examples of the work Muybridge did up and down the Pacific coast for the national body in charge of lighthouses, including a sequence of unusual large-format seascapes completed in the 1870s, at precisely the time that Thomas Stevenson (father of Robert Louis) was designing his lighthouses around the coasts of Scotland.

ECONOMIST: The many influences of an inventive early photographer

Earlier this year, Monsanto, a large biotechnology firm, announced a rough-and-ready sequence of the rice genome, and an international consortium is now trying to refine it.

ECONOMIST: The Arabidopsis genome

By extending the arm outwards and tuning Mahli back to look in the direction of the rover, a sequence of images can be acquired that anyone can then assemble into a large mosaic using the appropriate software.

BBC: Curiosity Mars rover spins its rock drill

According to Virginia Walbot, a botanist at Stanford University who is one of the Nature paper's authors, the Arabidopsis sequence will be a boon to researchers working on economically important plants, such as maize, that have large genomes which are harder to alter experimentally.

ECONOMIST: The Arabidopsis genome