The Juan De fuca plate which is under the North American plate is a small part of the Farallon plate of which the JDF is actually tearing 93 miles down below the surface. That plate is actually dying, and they don't know what happens to a tectonic plate when it comes to its end.

Often you are interested in a primary antibody that binds the antigen. Depending on where your primary antibody is from (serum, plasma, expression) it may not have a tag for direct detection, and it would be cumbersome to chemically add one.

Atlas of the Underworld would be interest to you — a research project which integrates seismic tomography datasets to produce an atlas of the mantle all the way down to the edge of the core, and thus all the known subducted slabs.

> As my understanding, lung did not evolve from gill

Correct. And as a side note, lots of people will tell you that lungs evolved from swim bladders, but in fact it appears that the reverse is true. Early lungs developed as a pouch off the digestive tract in early fish living in low oxygen waters, and only later did they develop into the specialized swim bladders that many fish have today.

> The D” (D double prime) layer, the lowermost zone of the mantle, was describe to me in grad school as the “subducting slab graveyard”.

It’s still fairly unexplained what exactly the D” prime layer is — whether it’s made from a build up of old semi-molten slabs or if it’s even compositionally different from the rest of the lower mantle at all is not yet settled. Even the idea of what the whole lower mantle in general is composed has evolved a lot since the discovery of the D” layer; in part due to new types of high pressure minerals being proposed as important parts of the mineralogy but also due to the ever increasing heterogeneity of the mantle as it gets probed at slightly higher resolutions with time.

>This layer was also hypothesized to insulate the core enough to cause heat anomalies large enough to create break thru hotspots in some places that give rise to features like the Hawaiian or Yellowstone hotspots.

I’m not sure that a slab-graveyard interpretation of the D” layer would provide thermal insulation at all — subducted slabs are colder than surrounding mantle material, even by the time they reach that depth; this would have the effect of increasing the thermal gradient (and thus heat loss) at the core mantle boundary rather than insulating; though in a roundabout way this can cause Rayleigh-Taylor instabilities (ie. thermally buoyant regions) elsewhere at the core-mantle-boundary. Seismic tomography makes a convincing case that the Hawaiian hot-spot has origins at the core-mantle-boundary, possibly from such a mechanism (or maybe because the physics of the fluid outer core just happen to create hotter and ‘colder’ regions of the CMB). The origins of the Yellowstone Hotspot are even more enigmatic, seismic methods employed by Yuan & Dueker, 2005 traces what is likely the Yellowstone plume down to only 500 km depth (over 2000 km higher than the CMB). Either a lower mantle counterpart to this plume existed in the past but doesn’t today, or the origin was/is at some point in the upper mantle.

It looks increasingly like the two huge continent scale structures known as LLSVPs which rise up from either side of the CMB and extend hundreds of kilometres through the mantle could be providing the sort of insulating process that you describe — whereby rising plumes get temporarily stuck underneath them and build up heat and/or material before leaking around the LLSVP edges to continue towards the surface. The whole thrust of the research from Torsvik et al, 2006 was establishing how surface expressions (in particular large igneous provinces) of plumes can be traced back to the margins of LLSVPs. The Yellowstone plume does not fit in with this model, but then that would make sense with it not having a deep mantle origin as origins at or near the CMB would be the ones to get ‘stuck’ underneath LLSVPs.

”30-35 galaxies”

Why is there a range? Is our own galaxy blocking the view and we can’t be certain what is out there, or is it a matter of definition or consensus on what galaxies are considered part of the local group?

>Why don't they just melt?

Pressure is too high to let them. That said, "melt" isn't a well defined term in conditions like this; at what point has ice cream melted?

>Are there fossils buried in the mantle?

Yep. If fossiliferous rocks are subducted, the fossils will be buried in the mantle until eventually, those fossils are somehow transformed beyond being recognizable as fossils (i.e. they're mixed enough, melted or not).

Nah. I saw that movie. Once the Ice Age starts, it only takes until The Day After Tomorrow. :)

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nope... a similar smorgasbord of large and small. However, the Virgo cluster does have several elliptical galaxies which "we" do not have. We have two large spiral galaxies and a bunch of irregular ones, but no elliptical.

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Space is a real thing that can expand. If you’ve heard phrases like “the fabric of spacetime” or “the spacetime continuum”, these are actually real, not just some sci-fi mumbo jumbo. You can imagine a big rubber sheet, on which all the planets and stars and everything are sitting. If you label this sheet with a grid and stretch it out, you’ll see that stuff gets further apart, but it doesn’t change position on the grid. That’s how space expands: it doesn’t move things, it just makes the distance between them bigger. (Note: don’t take this analogy too far: unlike rubber, space can stretch infinitely, and it doesn’t “snap back” into place).

So space expanding makes distances bigger, but it doesn’t make objects move any faster. Nothing ever moves faster than light, even when space expands. It just travels a shorter distance, so it can get places earlier.

Also, there is no “center” of the universe. No matter where you are, whether on Earth or on Jupiter or floating somewhere in the middle of the Andromeda Galaxy, if you take the measurements and do the calculations, you’ll find that you are at the center. Every single point in the universe can be treated as the “center”, and every single one of those points would be perfectly accurate for any tests or measurements or calculations you could think of. So, either everything is the center, or nothing is, but there’s not one singular point we can look at and say “yeah that’s the literal exact center and nothing else is.”

Somewhat surprised that you're familiar with the concept of heritability, but not yet come across regression of offspring on mid-parents as a method to estimate it. For example:

Parent-offspring regression to estimate the heritability of an HIV-1 trait in a realistic setup

Comparing parent–offspring regression with frequentist and Bayesian animal models to estimate heritability in wild populations: a simulation study for Gaussian and binary traits

It is! I’ve seen it once in the Sierra Nevada mountains in California, years ago. Spectacular!

Thanks this clears it up a whole lot for me!

There are vast voids in space. There are few to no galaxies in these areas, and they take up about 80% of the universe. Anywhere not a void is actually relatively boisterous compared to the average.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Void_(astronomy)

Are the galaxies on average much smaller in the Virgo cluster?

Thanks for this - in the future, please report the comment, it's faster for us to get to.

Check out this helpful xkcd timeline, it is a bit old by now and we should be on the optimistic path, if not even a bit better depending on if green tech keeps getting adopted faster. But it is a good way of seeing how stable temperatures have been for the last 20 000 years.

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If the last of a plate is subducted, the result is a boundary between the overriding plate and whatever was on the other side of the subducted plate. For instance, the west coast of North America was once a subduction zone between the North American Plate and the Farallon Plate. Eventually, the Farallon Plate was almost completely subducted and North America met the spreading center between the Farallon and Pacific Plates, forming the current boundary, which includes the San Andreas Fault.

If, instead of a spreading center reaching the trench, the plate includes continental crust, then a continental collision results, as in the case of India colliding with Eurasia.

For ELISAs to show binding we used an HRP-conjugated protein that we conjugated with a kit (3 hour process, very easy to do) and it worked great. Plenty of labs conjugate the "primary" sensor (antibody or protein) and forgo secondary. There are disadvantages of course but sometimes you don't have a choice and it works fine with enough concentration.

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