Dimethyl sulfide
File sealed
The detectives are still writing this one up. The poster and the facts are below; the film and the interrogation room open soon.
Booking photographs
The suspect, from its real atomic coordinates. Drag to turn it. Height chart in nanometers, ruled every 0.02 nm. Stood beside a DNA double helix (2 nm across), it would come about a quarter of the way up.
Rap sheet
- Answers to
- DMS. Often mistaken for ozone.
- Height
- 0.46 nm. Nine atoms, all told.
- Weight
- 0.10 zeptograms
- Build
- One sulfur, with a methyl group on each arm.
- Smell
- Neat: cabbage. Diluted: the seashore.
- Habits
- Given off by plankton. Petrels and shearwaters follow it to their dinner.
- Suspected
- Of seeding clouds. Possibly sighted on a planet 124 light-years away; witnesses disagree.
- Last seen
- A 5 mL tube marked SEA in the fridge at HQ.
of them in a gallon of seawater, on average.
More in summer. You’ve never seen one.
The poster on the street
This is the photocopied wanted poster for Dimethyl sulfide, No. 2. They were made for noticeboards around Boston, Cambridge and the rest of the east coast.
Found one? Scan its QR code with your phone. If you're a signed-in player, the sighting goes on your record with +1 XP.
Not a player yet? Join the Epic Quest: the real role-playing game of Molecular Reality, a nanopore lab, with the CEO as gamemaster.