That led to him designing the apes seen in the Dawn of Man sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey, a laborious two-year process that at one stage saw comedian Ronnie Corbett participate in make-up tests.

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The rover was scheduled to touch down in less than forty-eight hours, after the most complex and technically daring landing sequence in the history of the space program.

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In stoppage time, a bizarre sequence of events saw Darwen reduced to nine men in the space of a few seconds.

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This was the fourth event - the start of a renewed collapse of the birth rate, perhaps its longest and fastest ever, only a year later, quite unlike the more sustained boom of the 1960s and completing a sequence of down, up and then down again in the space of a few years by magnitudes that make you wonder how midwives, hospitals, schools and others coped on this rollercoaster.

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And as any investor in this space knows, right now there are doubts about how well the companies that sequence DNA are going to do in the short term as the bad economy could lead to shortfalls in research spending.

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In 1988 Phobos 1, a Soviet Mars probe, was sent a command sequence in which one crucial character was accidentally omitted, causing it to start tumbling in space.

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