If you wander outside on these late summer nights, you might hear the din of calling songs from field crickets. Male crickets produce these songs to attract their mates—but they may also draw the attention of acoustically ...
Plants & Animals
Sep 20, 2019
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85
Climate change and over-tapped waterways could leave developing parts of Asia without enough water to cool power plants in the near future, new research indicates.
Environment
Sep 20, 2019
1
62
Since "2001: A Space Odyssey," people have wondered: could machines like HAL 9000 eventually exist that can process information with human-like intelligence?
Evolution
Sep 20, 2019
2
195
In independent studies, two Princeton University research teams recently identified surprisingly large sources of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, being leaked into the atmosphere. Pound for pound, methane causes a far ...
Environment
Sep 20, 2019
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27
Hundreds of thousands of protesters in Australia, many of them children who skipped school, kicked off a day of demonstrations around the world against climate change in the run-up to a U.N. summit in New York.
Environment
Sep 20, 2019
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23
Tens of thousands of dead fish have been found on the banks of a lake in a protected nature reserve in northern Greece after high temperatures and drought conditions caused a severe drop in water levels.
Environment
Sep 19, 2019
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94
As the global demand for tissue and organ transplants significantly outstrips supply, tissue engineering might provide a potential solution. But one of the significant challenges in tissue engineering is growing tissue in ...
Biotechnology
Sep 18, 2019
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31
Our present moment is characterized by a growing obsession with the long term. The study of climate change, for example, relies on increasingly long-range simulations. Science's predictions are no longer merely hypotheses ...
Environment
Sep 18, 2019
2
29
From transport and housing to food production and fashion, our civilisation is driving climate and ecological breakdown.
Earth Sciences
Sep 18, 2019
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25
Animals around the globe face rising extinction rates, but there is often a lack of data about the causes of population declines, as well as ecological and biological considerations for conservation.
Ecology
Sep 17, 2019
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7
Nature, in the broadest sense, is equivalent to the natural world, physical world, or material world. "Nature" refers to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. It ranges in scale from the subatomic to the cosmic.
The word nature is derived from the Latin word natura, or "essential qualities, innate disposition", and in ancient times, literally meant "birth". Natura was a Latin translation of the Greek word physis (φύσις), which originally related to the intrinsic characteristics that plants, animals, and other features of the world develop of their own accord. The concept of nature as a whole, the physical universe, is one of several expansions of the original notion; it began with certain core applications of the word φύσις by pre-Socratic philosophers, and has steadily gained currency ever since. This usage was confirmed during the advent of modern scientific method in the last several centuries.
Within the various uses of the word today, "nature" often refers to geology and wildlife. Nature may refer to the general realm of various types of living plants and animals, and in some cases to the processes associated with inanimate objects – the way that particular types of things exist and change of their own accord, such as the weather and geology of the Earth, and the matter and energy of which all these things are composed. It is often taken to mean the "natural environment" or wilderness–wild animals, rocks, forest, beaches, and in general those things that have not been substantially altered by human intervention, or which persist despite human intervention. For, example, manufactured objects and human interaction generally are not considered part of nature, unless qualified as, for example, "human nature" or "the whole of nature". This more traditional concept of natural things which can still be found today implies a distinction between the natural and the artificial, with the artificial being understood as that which has been brought into being by a human consciousness or a human mind. Depending on the particular context, the term "natural" might also be distinguished from the unnatural, the supernatural, or synthetic.
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