Short answers, pulled from the story.
Nature was founded in the autumn of 1869 by Norman Lockyer and first published by Alexander Macmillan. Lockyer chose the name from a line by William Wordsworth: "To the solid ground of nature trusts the Mind that builds for aye."
According to the 2022 Journal Citation Reports, Nature's impact factor was 50.5, placing it among the highest-ranked multidisciplinary science journals. Its impact factor in 2019 was 42.778 as measured by Thomson ISI.
Fewer than 8% of submitted papers are accepted for publication in Nature. Most submissions are rejected without peer review, on the basis that they do not address a sufficiently topical or ground-breaking subject.
Nature has published papers announcing the wave nature of particles, the discovery of the neutron, nuclear fission, the structure of DNA, plate tectonics, pulsars, the ozone hole, the first cloning of a mammal (Dolly the sheep), and the human genome sequence.
Nature rejected Enrico Fermi's paper on the weak interaction theory of beta decay (published by Zeitschrift fur Physik in 1934), Paul Lauterbur and Peter Mansfield's MRI research (which later won the Nobel Prize in Medicine), and work on Cherenkov radiation, Hideki Yukawa's meson, and Stephen Hawking's black-hole radiation, among others.
Nature endorsed a US presidential candidate for the first time on the 30th of October 2008, supporting Barack Obama during his 2008 presidential campaign. The journal has since made repeated presidential endorsements, which philosopher of science Byron Hyde has argued were a mistake that cost public trust.