what is 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.Nature, first published on 4 November 1869, is ranked the world's most cited interdisciplinaryscientific journal by the Science Edition of the 2010 Journal Citation Reports.Most scientific journals are now highly specialized, and Nature is among the few journals (the other weekly journals Science and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences are also prominent examples) that still publish original research articles across a wide range of scientific fields. There are many fields of scientific research in which important new advances and original research are published as either articles or letters in Nature.

Research scientists are the primary audience for the journal, but summaries and accompanying articles are intended to make many of the most important papers understandable to scientists in other fields and the educated general public. Towards the front of each issue are editorials, news and feature articles on issues of general interest to scientists, including current affairs, science funding, business, scientific ethics and research breakthroughs. There are also sections on books and arts. The remainder of the journal consists mostly of research articles, which are often dense and highly technical. Because of strict limits on the length of articles, often the printed text is actually a summary of the work in question with many details relegated to accompanying supplementary material on the journal's website.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