The iQue M5 shows major highways, thoroughfares, railways, lakes, rivers and borders within its built-in base map of North and South America and Puerto Rico.

MSN: Supercharged PDA with GPS really flies

Curiosity mission planner Dawn Sumner said photographs like the ones beamed back by the rover, as well as others taken by probes in orbit, will be used to map a path to the mountain's base -- "doing the best science we can along the way, but also keeping our eyes on that beautiful layered rock, " she said.

CNN: Mars panorama shows Curiosity's prime target

The genome project, which the government began in 1987, aimed to speed the gene-hunting effort by providing the first full map of all 3 billion base pairs that make up human DNA. (It was not necessary, in this effort, to run through all the pairs on each set of chromosomes, or 6 billion pairs.) And because the base pairs come in only four varieties, they are digital and ideal for computer decoding.

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