Work of art

A work of art, artwork, art piece, piece of art or art object is an aesthetic physical item or artistic creation. Apart from "work of art", which may be used of any work regarded as art in its widest sense, including works from literature and music, these terms apply principally to tangible, portable forms of visual art:

Used more broadly, the term is less commonly applied to:

Works (Pink Floyd album)

Works is a Pink Floyd compilation album released in 1983. It features a variety of material, such as (among others) the band's early singles, "Arnold Layne" and "See Emily Play", alternative mixes of tracks from The Dark Side of the Moon, and the previously unreleased track, "Embryo".

Release and contents

The album was released by their former American label, Capitol Records, to compete with their then-current album The Final Cut. The main interest for collectors is the track "Embryo", an outtake from Ummagumma that later became a concert staple in a greatly elongated form, which originally only appeared in January 1970 on a scarce various artists compilation album promoting Pink Floyd's UK label Harvest Records entitled Picnic – A Breath of Fresh Air. Also unique to Works, the tracks "Brain Damage" and "Eclipse" are presented as alternate versions, possibly stereo mixes from the master tapes of the quadraphonic edition of The Dark Side of the Moon.

Alternate recordings

Factory-backed

In motorsports, a factory-backed racing team or driver is one sponsored by a vehicle manufacturer in official competitions. As motorsport competition is an expensive endeavor, some degree of factory support is desired and often necessary for success. The lowest form of factory backing comes in the form of contingency awards, based upon performance, which help to defray the cost of competing. Full factory backing can be often seen in the highest forms of international competition, with major motorsport operations often receiving hundreds of millions of euros to represent a particular manufacturer.

One-make series can also be backed by the factory, notably Ferrari Challenge and Porsche Supercup purely to allow themselves sell their competition specials of their models to customers and to organize series. These series commonly offer prize money and even sometimes a factory drive to an upper lever series.

In lower level racing, support from dealerships and importers may also be referred to as factory backing. In drifting, where factory backed teams are few and far between (Mopar and Pontiac of Formula D for example), works team/drivers are those backed by large or highly established tuning companies, as opposed to those entered by the drivers themselves or smaller and less well-off tuning companies. The advantage to this is drivers can get access to expensive prototype parts provided by the company that are not yet available to customers and in the event of their car being too badly damaged to compete, a back-up car will be available to them.

Nature

Nature, in the broadest sense, is the natural, physical, or material world or universe. "Nature" can refer to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. The study of nature is a large part of science. Although humans are part of nature, human activity is often understood as a separate category from other natural phenomena.

The word nature is derived from the Latin word natura, or "essential qualities, innate disposition", and in ancient times, literally meant "birth".Natura is 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 continued during the advent of modern scientific method in the last several centuries.

Nature (journal)

Nature is a British interdisciplinary scientific journal, first published on 4 November 1869. It was ranked the world's most cited scientific journal by the Science Edition of the 2010 Journal Citation Reports, is ascribed an impact factor of approximately 42.4, and is widely regarded as one of the few remaining academic journals that publishes original research across a wide range of scientific fields.Nature claims an online readership of about 3 million unique readers per month. The journal has a weekly circulation of around 53,000 but studies have concluded that on average a single copy is shared by as many as eight people.

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 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 papers (articles or letters), which are often dense and highly technical. Because of strict limits on the length of papers, 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.

Mother Nature

Mother Nature (sometimes known as Mother Earth or the Earth-Mother), is a common personification of nature that focuses on the life-giving and nurturing aspects of nature by embodying it ,in the form of the mother.

Western tradition history

The word "nature" comes from the Latin word, "natura," meaning birth or character (see nature (innate)). In English its first recorded use (in the sense of the entirety of the phenomena of the world) was in 1266 A.D.. "Natura", and the personification of Mother Nature, was widely popular in the Middle Ages. As a concept, seated between the properly divine and the human, it can be traced to Ancient Greece, though Earth (or "Eorthe" in the Old English period) may have been personified as a goddess. The Norse also had a goddess called Jord (or Earth).

The earliest written dated literal references to the term "Mother Earth" occur in Mycenaean Greek. Ma-ka (transliterated as ma-ga), "Mother Gaia", written in Linear B syllabic script (13th or 12th century BC). The various myths of nature goddesses such as Inanna/Ishtar (myths and hymns attested on Mesopotamian tablets as early as the 3rd millennium BC) show that the personification of the creative and nurturing sides of nature as female deities has deep roots. In Greece, the pre-Socratic philosophers had "invented" nature when they abstracted the entirety of phenomena of the world as singular: physis, and this was inherited by Aristotle. Later medieval Christian thinkers did not see nature as inclusive of everything, but thought that she had been created by God; her place lay on earth, below the unchanging heavens and moon. Nature lay somewhere in the center, with agents above her (angels), and below her (demons and hell). For the medieval mind she was only a personification, not a goddess.