Living on the rugged landscape of rocks and concrete, the red velvet mite Balaustium murorum braves intense sunlight and ultraviolet radiation. These non-parasitic mites feed largely on pollen and emerge during spring from ...
Plants & Animals
13 hours ago
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3
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Economics & Business
20 hours ago
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20
Canada's carbon-capturing natural areas can play a small—but effective—part in the country's overall strategy to lower greenhouse gas emissions, according to a national report including two University of Alberta experts.
Environment
21 hours ago
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8
Chinese scientists have developed a surface nanocrystallization method to create all-natural wood-inspired aerogel with better thermal insulation and fire retardancy.
Biochemistry
21 hours ago
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7
Food prices in the U.K. are at their highest for 15 years and something similar is happening in almost every country around the world.
Economics & Business
Feb 7, 2023
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12
As Western states haggle over reducing water use because of declining flows in the Colorado River Basin, a more hopeful drama is playing out in Glen Canyon.
Earth Sciences
Feb 7, 2023
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33
Researchers at South China Agricultural University have developed new insecticidal compounds that show significantly reduced bee toxicity without reducing effectiveness against target pests—in this case, the diamondback ...
Ecology
Feb 7, 2023
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23
Cassava is one of the most important crops in the tropics, feeding half a billion people in more than 80 countries. Cassava bacterial blight (CBB) is a devastating disease that causes crop losses worldwide.
Biotechnology
Feb 7, 2023
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16
The harmonious coexistence between human society and nature has prompted the rapid development of advanced manufacturing. Typically, green biomanufacturing, which uses renewable resources as raw materials and enzymes or microorganisms ...
Analytical Chemistry
Feb 7, 2023
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18
Agriculture is considered a major disturbance for ecological systems—the recovery of degraded or formally used agricultural land might take a long time.
Ecology
Feb 7, 2023
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13
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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