Humans have cooked with fire for millennia, but it may be time for a change. Natural gas appliances warm the planet in two ways: generating carbon dioxide by burning natural gas as a fuel and leaking unburned methane into ...
Environment
4 hours ago
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115
Researchers have discovered what appears to be the earliest known account of a rare weather phenomenon called ball lightning in England.
Environment
13 hours ago
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113
A new study by ecologists at the University of Chicago shows that the genes present in a microbial community can predict the community's dynamic metabolic activity, with implications for the nitrogen cycle and other important ...
Cell & Microbiology
21 hours ago
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New research results from Linnaeus University opens for a future with more sustainably produced nanotechnology, where limited natural resources can be replaced with, among other things, maize and milk proteins.
Bio & Medicine
22 hours ago
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14
Researchers at the University of Stirling have found that animals in lakes closest to the Chernobyl nuclear reactor have more genetic mutations than those from further away, giving new insight into the effect of radiation ...
Plants & Animals
22 hours ago
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19
Around the world, populations of many beloved species are declining at increasing rates. According to one grim projection, as many as 40% of the world's species may be extinct by 2050. Alarmingly, many of these declines are ...
Plants & Animals
23 hours ago
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14
Strict COVID-19 lockdown policies such as workplace closures in European cities reduced levels of air pollution and the number of associated deaths, according to new estimates published in Scientific Reports.
Environment
Jan 26, 2022
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100
As a major source of greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions, food production has long occupied an important place in the climate-change discussion. Writing in BioScience, Alice Jones of the University of Adelaide, and an international ...
Environment
Jan 25, 2022
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18
Standing in a sunlit grove of stately giant sequoias is a simultaneously humbling and uplifting experience. Dwarfed by the world's largest living organisms, some of which have stood since the fall of ancient Egypt and the ...
Environment
Jan 25, 2022
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11
A Lima zoo is racing to save dozens of seabirds, including protected penguins, after 6,000 barrels of crude oil spilled off Peru's coast due to waves from a volcanic eruption in the South Pacific.
Environment
Jan 24, 2022
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14
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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