GC55VHF Mad For Science: DNA
Type: Traditional | Size: Regular | Difficulty: | Terrain:
By: Triggur @ | Hide Date: 05/28/2014 | Status: Available
Country: United States | State: Colorado
Coordinates: N40° 45.344 W105° 33.319 | Last updated: 08/30/2019 | Fav points: 0
       

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You're looking for a regular sized ammo can with a log and pen, some foreign coins, one of the copper vacuum seal rings from my fusion reactor, and one of the pinballs for my new custom-made machine.

If you find that your sunny day coordinates are different from my cloudy day coordinates, please do let me know and I'll update them!

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No scale comparisons necessary here.

DNA (DeoxyriboNuleicAcid) is the basis for life as we know it (RNA is also involved but we'll skip that today).

DNA is a complex helical molecule that encodes the instructions to build and maintain a life-form. It's constructed of 4 kinds of nucleotides, labeled G, A, T, and C (guanine, adenine, thymine, and cytosine, respectively). These cling to each other in "base pairs" made of AT and GC. DNA molecules wind together into "chromosomes," which are large enough to see under a microscope.

There's an enormous amount of information stored in the DNA of every single cell in your body. Some 3.2 billion base pairs are inside your 23 chromosomes (this is doubled because you have 2 copies, so 6.4 billion in total). The molecules are all folded together into these packages.

Estimates of the length of the DNA in a single cell vary wildly. The most common estimate is that if you unfolded all of the DNA in a single human cell, it would stretch about 2 meters. Humans contain roughly 100 trillion cells.

So if you unfolded all of the DNA in all of your cells and laid it end to end, It would stretch from the sun to Pluto and back. Seventeen times*. Or picture it as being from here to the moon and back... more than a quarter million times.

And you thought Ikea instructions were hard!

*calculation references

06/06/2015 By Denali41
Based on Triggur's maintenance note published yesterday, my puppy Orizaba and I hiked up to Mad For Science: DNA and made the find this morning, signing the cache log as the {FTF} cacher. This cache completes the series for me, and I may have reeled in the FTFs on every one of them--I don't recall. It's been a masterfully-created series. As a scientist, I've enjoyed it greatly. Plus it has the added dimension of each cache being "backcountry"; these are the kinds of caches I most enjoy and appreciate. So Mad For Science as a set of caches had great appeal to me. Thanks, Triggur, for a marvelous series and for the significant time it took you to conceptualize, prepare the descriptive information, and hide the individual caches! My puppy Orizaba was with me for every discovery. It required three hikes (because of the earlier DNF on DNA), and she thrived on all three of them.

06/05/2015 By Triggur
Wow, so that's how much things change in a year.

As noted by everyone, the fallen tree I hung it from is nowhere in evidence.

Worse, the hints for MFS:DNA and the hint for MFS:Star Scale were reversed!

My bad, guys. Sorry.

Anyway, I stashed a new cache here. This time it's a good old ammo can! I took new coordinates today but it was so cloudy, that now that I see it on google maps, I'm way off... so I'm keeping the old coordinates.

06/02/2015 By Pixel Magic
Oh no. Not another one.

I spent the better part of my afternoon caching adventure on this cache and the previous DNF. What frustration. I recalibrated my GPSr and got a fairly strong consistent reading but the bent juniper or arbor vitae had nothing for me to capture. A taller, more visually dominant tree isolated in some rocks seemed to be a more obvious choice but to no avail. This second DNF is starting to affect my confidence.

04/07/2015 By Denali41
)A nice, nice day for a hike (including the off-trail bushwhacking part) for my puppy Orizaba and me. We did it in style and arrived at the vicinity of GZ with no difficulty. Then the challenge came. My initial search image focused on all possibilities associated with the Hint. No luck. I expanded it out quite a ways. Still didn't work. Then assumed the Hint did not apply and made searches of many other possibilities (golly, there are lots in the area). Still no luck. After about 2 1/2 hours we headed out. Made a 6-mile loop with no cache but with a great adventure. "DNA" is the only one in the series I have not found. As a biologist, this hits to the core. I had the "firsts" on the others. Thanks, Triggur, for a fantastic series!

08/16/2014 By waawhoo
Well I made it to GZ and spent about an hour on the rocks searching for the cache, Both on the west and east side. Just making it up here was well worth the hike. Thanks!