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Letter: For the record

Published 7 March 2012

• The GridION device will be capable of sequencing a human genome in several hours, while the smaller MinION USB sequencing device is not designed to sequence entire genomes, contrary to the over-optimistic numbers we reported (25 February, p 23).

• The phrase “right to pursue happiness” appears in the US Declaration of Independence, not in the Constitution as we claimed in an earlier correction (11 February, p 33).

• Oops: salt doesn’t evaporate at terrestrial temperatures. We should have reported geologist Paul Knauth as saying that only once “large quantities of salt were safely locked away in land-based deposits could complex life take off in the oceans” (18 February, p 6).

Issue no. 2855 published 10 March 2012

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