Engineering

World's first LED lights developed from rice husks

Milling rice to separate the grain from the husks produces about 100 million tons of rice husk waste globally each year. Scientists searching for a scalable method to fabricate quantum dots have developed a way to recycle ...

Machine learning & AI

How to 'detox' potentially offensive language from an AI

Researchers from the Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Lab at the Technical University of Darmstadt demonstrate that artificial intelligence language systems also learn human concepts of "good" and "bad." The results ...

Energy & Green Tech

Wind, solar could replace coal power in Texas

Texas can be a model for the nation on how to effectively replace coal with wind and solar for the state's energy needs while meeting environmental goals, according to new research by Rice University engineers. 

Engineering

Deciphering behavior algorithms used by ants and the internet

Engineers sometimes turn to nature for inspiration. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Associate Professor Saket Navlakha and research scientist Jonathan Suen have found that adjustment algorithms—the same feedback control process ...

Energy & Green Tech

'Serious threat' of fugitive emissions with hydrogen plan

Australia's plans to produce hydrogen using fossil fuels carries significant risks and could create an industry that leads to an increase in greenhouse gas emissions, researchers from The Australian National University (ANU) ...

page 16 from 40

Nature

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.

This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA