You can enter a competition in this week’s New Scientist to have your mitochondrial DNA sequenced. This is one of those mind-bogglingly 21st Century things that we now take utterly for granted but would once have taken twenty technicians and a roomful of those black cubes covered in little blinking red lights about a year and a half to do. I’m certainly up for it (mind you, submitting the competition form seems to produce a fancy 404 page – “we can send a man to the moon and sequence the human genome but we can’t…”).