Nicole Mary Kidman is an Australian actress and producer. She has won many awards including an Academy Award, two Primetime Emmy Awards, five Golden Globe Awards, a Screen Actors Guild Award, she was listed among the highest-paid actresses in the world in 2006, 2018, 2019. Time magazine twice named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world, in 2004 and 2018. Kidman began her acting career in Australia with the 1983 films Bush BMX Bandits, her breakthrough came in 1989 with the miniseries Bangkok Hilton. In 1990, she made her Hollywood debut opposite Tom Cruise, she went on to achieve wider recognition with lead roles in Far and Away, Batman Forever, To Die For, Eyes Wide Shut. Kidman won the Academy Award for Best Actress for portraying the writer Virginia Woolf in the drama The Hours, her other Oscar-nominated roles were as a courtesan in the musical Moulin Rouge! and troubled mothers in the dramas Rabbit Hole and Lion. Kidman's other film credits include The Others, Cold Mountain, Birth, The Paperboy, Destroyer and Bombshell.

Her television roles include two projects for HBO, the biopic Hemingway & Gellhorn and the drama series Big Little Lies. The latter earned Kidman the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress and Outstanding Limited Series. Kidman has been a Goodwill ambassador for UNICEF since 1994 and for UNIFEM since 2006. In 2006, she was appointed Companion of the Order of Australia. Since she was born to Australian parents in Hawaii, Kidman has dual citizenship of Australia and the United States. In 2010, she founded the production company Blossom Films, she has been married to singer Keith Urban since 2006, was earlier married to Tom Cruise. Kidman was born 20 June 1967, in Honolulu, while her Australian parents were temporarily in the United States on student visas, her mother, Janelle Ann, is a nursing instructor who edited her husband's books and was a member of the Women's Electoral Lobby. Kidman's ancestry includes Scottish heritage. Being born in Hawaii, she was given the Hawaiian name "Hōkūlani", meaning "Heavenly Star".

The inspiration came from a baby elephant born around the same time at the Honolulu Zoo. At the time of Kidman's birth, her father was a graduate student at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, he became a visiting fellow at the National Institute of Mental Health of the United States. Opposed to the war in Vietnam, Kidman's parents participated in anti-war protests while living in Washington, D. C; the family returned to Australia when Kidman was four and her mother now lives on Sydney's North Shore. Kidman has Antonia Kidman, a journalist and TV presenter. Kidman attended Lane Cove Public School and North Sydney Girls' High School, she was enrolled in ballet at three and showed her natural talent for acting in her primary and high school years. She says that she was first inspired to become an actress upon seeing Margaret Hamilton's performance as the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz. Kidman has revealed that she was timid as a child, saying, "I am shy – shy – I had a stutter as a kid, which I got over, but I still regress into that shyness.

So I don't like walking into a crowded restaurant by myself. She attended the Australian Theatre for Young People. Here she took up drama and performing in her teens, finding acting to be a refuge. Owing to her fair skin and red hair, the Australian sun forced the young Kidman to rehearse in halls of the theatre. A regular at the Phillip Street Theatre, she received praise, encouragement to pursue acting full-time. In 1983, aged 16, Kidman made her film debut in a remake of the Australian holiday season favourite Bush Christmas. By the end of 1983, she had a supporting role in the television series Five Mile Creek. In 1984, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, which caused Kidman to halt her acting work temporarily while she studied massage so she could help her mother with physical therapy, she began gaining popularity in the mid-1980s after appearing in several film roles, including BMX Bandits, Watch the Shadows Dance, the romantic comedy Windrider, which earned Kidman attention due to her racy scenes.

During the decade, she appeared in several Australian productions, including the soap opera A Country Practice and the 1987 miniseries Vietnam. She made guest appearances on Australian television programs and TV movies. In 1988, Kidman appeared based on the play of the same name; the Australian film earned her an Australian Film Institute award for Best Supporting Actress. Kidman next starred with Sam Neill in Dead Calm as Rae Ingram; the thriller brought Kidman to international recognition. She gives the character of Rae real tenacity and energy." Meanwhile, critic Roger Ebert noted the excellent chemistry between the leads, stating, "Kidman and Zane do generate real, palpable hatred in their scenes together." She followed that up with the Australian miniseries Bangkok Hilton. She next moved on to star alongside her then-boyfriend and future husband, Tom Cruise, in the 1990 auto racing film Days of Thunder, as a young doct

Nothura is a genus of birds in the tinamou family. This genus comprises five members of this South American family. Tinamous are paleognaths related to the flightless ratites, they are close in appearance to the flying ancestors of the ratites. The species in taxonomic order are: †N. paludosa Mercerat 1897 †N. parvula Tambussi 1989 Nothura boraquira, white-bellied nothura, located in northeastern and central Brazil, eastern Bolivia, northeastern Paraguay Nothura minor, lesser nothura, located in the interior of southeastern Brazil Nothura darwinii, Darwin's nothura, located in southern Peru, western Bolivia, southern and western ArgentinaNothura darwinii darwinii located in south central Argentina Nothura darwinii peruviana located in southern Peru Nothura darwinii agassizii located in southeastern Peru and western Bolivia Nothura darwinii boliviana located in western Bolivia Nothura darwinii salvadorii located in western Argentina Nothura maculosa, spotted nothura, located in Argentina, Uruguay and southern BrazilNothura maculosa maculosa located in southern Brazil, eastern Paraguay, northeastern Argentina Nothura maculosa major located in the interior of east central Brazil Nothura maculosa nigroguttata located in south central Argentina Nothura maculosa cearensis located in northeastern Brazil Nothura maculosa paludivaga located in central Paraguay and north central Argentina Nothura maculosa annectens located in eastern Argentina Nothura maculosa submontana located in southwestern Argentina Nothura maculosa pallida located in northwestern Argentina Nothura maculosa chacoensis, Chaco nothura, located in northwestern Paraguay and north central Argentina Brands, Sheila.

"Systema Naturae 2000 / Classification, Genus Nothura". Project: The Taxonomicon. Retrieved 12 Feb 2009. Clements, James; the Clements Checklist of the Birds of the World. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ISBN 978-0-8014-4501-9. Davies, S. J. J. F.. "Tinamous". In Hutchins, Michael. Grzimek's Animal Life Encyclopedia. 8 Birds I Ratites to Hoatzins. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale Group. Pp. 57–59. ISBN 0-7876-5784-0. ITIS

A boom vang or kicking strap is a line or piston system on a sailboat used to exert downward force on the boom and thus control the shape of the sail. The Collins English Dictionary defines it as "A rope or tackle extended from the boom of a fore-and-aft mainsail to a deck fitting of a vessel when running, in order to keep the boom from riding up"; the vang runs from the base of the mast to a point about a third of the way out the boom. Due to the great force necessary to change the height of the boom while a boat is under sail, a line-based boom vang includes some sort of a pulley system. Hydraulic piston vangs are used on larger sailboats and controlled by manual or electric hydraulic pumps; the term kicking strap is shortened to "kicker" whilst sailing, e.g. "Hard on the kicker when we get to the leeward mark". On some sailing boats, such as the 49er, rather than a set of lines pulling the boom downwards, a rigid member is used to push the boom down. By controlling leech tension, the boom vang is one of the three methods of controlling sail twist.

On small sailboats and some cruising sailboats a vang may be omitted. If a vang is not installed the sheet has to try to control both horizontal and vertical angles of the boom; when the boom is near the centerline, the sheet is nearly vertical, can exert downward force on the boom. As the sheet is loosened to increase the horizontal angle of the boom and sail, the sheet becomes horizontal and exerts less downward force. A vang works with the sheet to apply the downward force on the boom at all horizontal angles, allowing the sheet to be used to control the horizontal angle of the boom effectively. While under sail, the opposite force to the vang is supplied by the sail itself; when the sail is furled, a topping lift supplies the upward force on the boom. Some line vang systems incorporate a piston to provide the topping lift force and to damp oscillations. Hydraulic vangs can inherently act in the topping lift role. A gnav is an inverted vang, it is a rigid strut that extends obliquely upward from the boom to the mast, exerting a force that pushes down on the boom.

As the fixing point of the gnav on the boom is hauled inwards towards the mast, the downward force on the boom increases. A gnav offers more uncluttered space beneath the boom when compared to a vang