What my man cygx said. But more generally, I wanted OP to articulate the principles that they were using to arrive at their conclusion. It’s a fool’s errand to answer a question without understanding the context that produced it.

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I mean if the chromosome in question relates to a particular phenotype that has a visible presentation such as a cleft chin you would be able to determine which parent you received that gene from simply by looking at their chins and your chin. The epigenetic’s question is one I can’t answer as well as there is still a ton of research going into epigenetics but I wouldn’t be surprised if a probability of which parent a chromosome came from could be estimated using it.

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Generally, energy within a system will tend to distribute until thermodynamic equilibrium is reached. But for a lot of systems that we study, it's a fair assumption that it's coupled to an environment that acts as a large, empty energy sink. So that sink will tend to take all the energy until the system we're interested in ends up in its lowest energy configuration.

For example, an electron orbiting an atom is coupled with the electromagnetic field, which is pretty empty for most situations. So if it's in an excited energy level, it will tend to dump that energy out as a photon until it reaches the ground state. But if the electromagnetic field is locally very active, with photons whizzing around everywhere, this approximation fails and you have to treat the electron's energy level statistically (like in a laser).

Another factor is friction, which in very abstract terms could be defined as the tendency for energy to fall out of macroscopic degrees of freedom towards microscopic. That's what ultimately makes a stirred fluid stop sloshing around, with the energy being dissipated into smaller and smaller vortices until it simply becomes heat.

I assume that a big factor here is that the nitrogen in the air isn't "freely available" in the same sense that it is in nitrates in the soil. It's stuck to other nitrogen atoms, and N2 has a huge bond energy compared to the nitrogen-hydrogen bond in stuff like ammonium ions.(To digress, the fact that nitrogen atoms so desperately wants to bond with other nitrogen atoms is what makes nitrates so reactive in things like explosives. The formation of N2 releasing a lot of energy is the flip side of breaking N2 requiring a lot of energy.)

As to the reason why plants need nitrogen (the element as opposed to the gas) in the first place: it's a major component of chlorophyll. I mean, probably other reasons, but definitely that one.

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Due to the metric expansion of space, the universe is not time translation invariant at cosmological scales, hence no energy conservation via Noether's first theorem. However, Noether's second theorem still applies due to general covariance, and you get an 'improper' / 'strict' (terminology differs) conservation law for any time-like vector field (in case of cosmological time, this yields the first Friedmann equation). However, these laws are non-covariant as they include gravitational contributions that cannot be localized via a stress-energy tensor. It's somewhat similar to what happens to energy conservation in rotating frames of reference, except that there's no longer such a thing as inertial frames that make energy conservation manifest. Consequently, a large portion of physicists find it less confusing to just state that energy conservation doesn't hold for the universe at large.

Let's look at the weak interaction first, it has a very similar situation: A top quark is so heavy that it can decay to a bottom quark plus a W boson. The W boson then decays to other particles. How can a neutron decay via the weak interaction? It's much lighter than a W boson, it cannot decay to it. It still couples to the associated field, however, and that couples to the decay products of a neutron. You never produce a real W boson in that decay but it allows a neutron to decay to proton+electron+antineutrino. Mathematically we can calculate the probability of this process using virtual particles. They are not real (hence the name), but they have some similarities to the real particles.

Back to gravity: If you shoot two protons at each other with an absurdly high energy then you can create a black hole. The black hole will then decay to a variety of particles, could involve protons but it doesn't have to - black holes don't differentiate between matter and antimatter. Random protons in a cold Earth don't have that energy, but they still interact via gravity, so just like for the W boson case there should be a decay process via virtual black holes. We can't calculate what proton lifetime that will produce (besides "absurdly long") and of course we cannot confirm something experimentally that we don't expect to happen even a single time over the next quadrillion years - but the process should be possible.

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Thats really interesting. I wonder if this is why after a night shift I struggle to speak and music sounds a bit distorted.

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Can you explain or point to a source for how decay by virtual black holes work? I've never heard of this

Assuming you have the whole chromosomes genetic sequences (or long reads spanning the crossover breakpoints) yes, due to crossover with occurs during the making of gametes. So in the son there will be one of the two chromosome N (take N=2 if no crossover occured in chromosome 1..) that will be a mix of the mother's two copies of chromosome N.

On the other hand none of the mother's chromosome N will be a mix of the two copies of the son's chromosome N.

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Is there any indication that the blood flow / operation of the ear / auditory nerve itself is affected by tiredness?

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That's a very interesting post!! Thank you for the enlightenment.

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