However it's not always clear if our new labors to save species are herculean or Sisyphean. The only hope for sustaining America's whooping cranes might be men dressed in white costumes flying ultralight aircraft. Rescuing a single humpback whale may inadvertently leave a unique butterfly habitat destroyed. To save endangered salmon, humans might find themselves hazing sea lions with firecrackers. The future oflooks more and more complicated as humans become entangled in the lives of animals, and people can't always tell if their efforts will ultimately be futile, or worse, do more harm than good.

In his new book "Wild Ones" (Penguin), which hit shelves today (May 16), Jon Mooallem tackles this maddening uncertainty through the eyes of people working with animals that have fallen victim to human whims among them, birds dependent on people to survive,feeling the pressures of climate change, and butterflies boxed into a broken habitat. Mooallem, who is a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine, talked to LiveScience this week about his book and how to decide which species to save and why. The following is an interview, edited for length and clarity. []

LiveScience: An underlying theme in your book seems to be that humans are uncomfortable with admitting how much power we have over other living things on the planet. Why do you think this is especially the case with animals?

Jon Mooallem: In just a very basic way, animals are the creatures we share the planet with. They're not like trees and rocks. They're not part of the scenery. They seem to have lives of their own going on, and that makes us really curious about them. And for a long time in human history, a lot of animals were also our competitors. We had to deal with predators. We were afraid of them, or we were trying to catch the same fish. Now we've evolved to a point where we really have so much of the planet on lockdown that even these rivals or these animals we've looked up to are under our control, and it's an incredibly uncomfortable thought. We shouldn't have that kind of purchase over these other beings.

LS: Some , like the Lange's metalmark butterfly featured in your book, are already living outside of their original context in the wild and, at this point, their extinction wouldn't seem to tear a big hole in the ecosystem. Is there an ultimate argument for saving a species even when their importance in the ecosystem is not so obvious?

JM: That gets at a core confusion in how we think about a lot of endangered species. Some of the arguments that we use to justify working to save these animals really aren't applicable and they really aren't the most powerful arguments either. Sometimes we try to make scientific arguments for species where it really comes down to a matter of emotion or even nostalgia. We'd like to preserve some of these things maybe because they're beautiful, maybe because we don't want to feel guilty about having exterminated them. I think those can be two really valid reasons for working very hard to save an . There's something gorgeous about trying to preserve something that we care about in an aesthetic sense or an emotional sense. Conservation, I find, doesn't really know how to talk through those arguments that well yet, and oftentimes people are wary of making them.

LS: Do you think revising our definition of wildness would change the way we look at animals and conservation?

JM: That's one of the real challenges right now, to figure out what it is we want to preserve when we say we want to preserve wilderness or wildness. The fact is that preserving a lot of species involves a kind of hands-on management that is completely at odds with our more romantic ideas of what wildness is. That doesn't necessarily mean that those projects aren't worth undertaking. I think it means we need to recalibrate our idea of what wildness is.

LS: You touch on how our emotional attachment to certain animals, like polar bears, colors the way we interact with them. Did you find yourself feeling sympathetic to any of your animal subjects?

JM: Amazingly, no. I was surprised by that. Doing reporting about wild animals actually involves very little exposure to actual animals. You always have to see the animal through the filter of the people who have access to it. I didn't write a book where I just wandered around the woods hoping to encounter a mountain lion. I went to the polar bear capital of the world in Manitoba to look at polar bears in a place where 10,000 tourists come every year to look at them. And in that context, I felt like the animals did become obscured somehow like they were part of the scenery individual animals, in any case. When I went to the place where they were breeding endangered butterflies it was basically a ramshacklefarm where the butterflies were in plastic deli containers on plants, so it was hard to form a one-on-one, gushy bond with the animals. []

LS: Did any of your human subjects emerge as personal heroes for you?

JM: I found something heroic in almost everyone in the book. Maybe not a storybook form of heroism, where you see an obstacle and you work very hard and you surmount it. It's more like a Zen heroism, where you see an obstacle and you try to surmount it, and you realize that it's going to be much more complicated and perhaps never-ending, and you still try to surmount it anyway. I think that there's a real nobility in that. I think the people at Operation Migration the nonprofit that flies ultralight aircraft in front of whooping cranes to teach them to migrate I think that they're a really exaggerated example of that in the sense that they're spending all fall on the road and trying to get these birds to Florida amid tons of very idiosyncratic frustrations, but somehow they're still able to wake up in the morning at dawn and check the wind and see if it's a good day to fly. I think, not just in terms of being a conservationist but in terms of being a human being, there's some really valuable lessons to be learned there. []

LS: Did you have a different idea about how this book was going to turn out when you started writing it?

JM: I don't know that I had expectations that were upended or anything like that. I will say I was pretty amazed at how much chance played into the stories of these people and the stories of these animals. When you scratch the surface of a lot of these recoveries and try to figure out, 'How do we get to this point where there's only 40 some-odd butterflies on a piece of land?' or 'How did this project get so elaborate that we have men in costumes flyingin front of birds?' when you try to trace back those histories and bring them up to the present you realize there isn't any grand design. The endangered species are so reliant on humankind right now that simple things like when a committed lepidopterist who's working to save the butterflies suddenly gets a rash and he has to give up his work little accidents like this, little freak occurrences, have humungous repercussions for the animals themselves.

LS: After immersing yourself in this world for a while, do you have any recommendations for conservationists or do you see any problems that they are going to need to confront in the near future?

JM: Conservation is a national project. Under the Endangered Species Act and other environmental laws, it's a project that our government has taken on and thinks there's going to have to be some really substantive policy talks about how that work is going to move forward. Just from a sheer funding standpoint, there's going to be some difficult decisions to make as a lot of the threats against these species continue to ramp up, and the work gets even more involved and in some cases more futile. I don't know at this point that I have policy talking points because I think the problem right now is that we're just not asking the right questions in a lot of cases. It's not a matter of having the right answers but basic questions like, Why are we saving this particular creature? Are we saving it because we want it to be part of this ecosystem, or are we saving it more for aesthetic reasons? What happens when the needs of an endangered species conflict with the needs of a person on the same land? I think we just need a clearer sense of what our priorities actually are and why we're doing what we're doing before we can go about trying to do it better.

Follow Megan Gannon onandFollow us ,& . Original article on .

In a victory for the protesters, an Istanbul court later ordered the temporary suspension of the project to uproot the trees. But demonstrators around the country kept up protests denouncing what they called a heavy-handed crackdown and a government seen as displaying increasingly authoritarian tendencies.

Police took action on the fourth day of the sit-in against a government plan to revamp Taksim square. Officers clashed with angry demonstrators in surrounding areas, firing tear gas canisters and pushing people back with water cannon. A cloud of smoke from the gas filled the square and scattered protests continued into the night.

In solidarity with protesters in Istanbul, some 5,000 people gathered at a park in the capital, Ankara, swelling into a busy street nearby. They chanted anti-government slogans and called on Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to resign. Police used tear gas to push back a group that tried to march toward the Parliament building.

Protests were also held in a dozen other cities, including one that drew thousands in the third-largest city of Izmir, reports said.

The Istanbul protesters were demanding the square's Gezi Park be protected from plans that include the construction of a shopping mall. Many also aired grievances against Erdogan, whose style has become increasingly uncompromising during his government's third successive term.

Last week, the government enacted a law restricting the sale and advertising of alcohol, a move that has alarmed secular Turks.

Earlier this week, the government went ahead with a ground-breaking ceremony for the construction of a disputed third bridge across the Bosporus Strait that some say will destroy the few remaining green areas of the sprawling city. It also named the bridge after a controversial Ottoman sultan believed to have ordered a massacre of a minority Shiite Muslim group, instead of choosing a more unifying figure.

Protesters in Gezi Park held up a large poster Friday with a caricature depicting Erdogan as an Ottoman sultan with a caption that read: "The people won't yield to you."

Protester Serdar Sanman accused Erdogan of "trying to install his dictatorship."

Erdogan's Islamic-rooted, conservative government has a strong support base in the mainly Muslim but secular country, and many of the protesters appeared to be from more secular-leaning sections of society.

In Ankara, demonstrators held up posters reading: "Don't Interfere in my Lifestyle" and "Resist the Dictator." Many drank beer and other alcoholic beverages during the protest in defiance of the alcohol restrictions, raising their drinks as they chanted "Cheers Tayyip!" They lined the pavement with empty beer and liquor bottles and cans.

Erdogan this week dismissed the Istanbul protesters' demands, saying the government would go ahead with the renovation plans "no matter what they do." The forestry minister said more trees would be planted than those uprooted at Gezi.

The dawn raid was the latest in a series of aggressive crackdown on protests. Human rights activists frequently accuse Turkish police of using inordinate force to break up protests and of excessively using tear gas and pepper spray against protesters.

Interior Minister Muammer Guler said that authorities would investigate the reports of disproportionate use of force. Still, he defended the crackdown, saying officers were carrying out their duties against an illegal occupation of the park.

In Istanbul, several protesters were injured when a wall they climbed on collapsed during a police chase, and at least two people including a journalist were hit in the head by tear gas canisters. Two opposition legislators were among several hospitalized after being affected by the gas, the private Dogan news agency reported.

Istanbul Gov. Huseyin Avni Mutlu said 12 people were treated in hospitals for injuries and least 13 people were detained.

In Washington, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said the U.S. was concerned about the number of people injured as police dispersed protesters.

"We believe that Turkey's long-term stability, security and prosperity is best guaranteed by upholding the fundamental freedoms of expression, assembly and association, which is what it seems these individuals were doing," she told reporters. "These freedoms are crucial to any healthy democracy."

Psaki said the U.S. was still gathering information about the incident.

There was very little coverage of the protests on television channels in Turkey, reflecting the environment of self-censorship by the media, which has, among other things, been pressured into dismissing staff too critical of the government.

The media rights group Reporters without Borders said the injured journalist, Ahmet Sik, and others were deliberately targeted by police and urged Turkish authorities to halt the "excessive" use of force. A Reuters photographer was also injured.

Amnesty International also deplored what it called Turkish police brutality and said some officers should be brought to justice.

Demonstrators affected by tear gas sought shelter at a luxury hotel at Taksim and were tended by guests. Police removed tents and the demonstrators' belongings and mounted barricades around the park.

The state-run Anadolu Agency said 15 demonstrators were detained in Ankara.

"The people are demonstrating against the government's intolerance toward demonstrations," said Metin Feyzioglu, who heads Turkey's lawyers' association, during the protest in Ankara. "The government must display understanding and immediately stop the violence against the demonstrators."

_____

Fraser reported from Ankara.

The Dow Jones industrial average slipped 13 points to 15,311 shortly after the opening bell Friday, the last day of May. That's a decline of 0.1 percent. The Dow is still up 17 percent this year.

The Standard & Poor's 500 index was down less than a point at 1,654. The Nasdaq composite index was down three points at 3,488, or 0.1 percent.

Spending by American consumers fell 0.2 percent in April, the first decline since last May. Incomes were unchanged after rising in March.

Lions Gate Entertainment rose 4 percent to $29.20 after its income and revenue beat Wall Street's forecasts.

For most of us, the effects of the price drop were masked by the tinge of scandal: Among the victims of the crash was the infamous Solyndra, which went bankrupt at the cost to the country of hundreds of millions of dollars. Conservatives seized on the company's collapse as a reason for the government to divest itself from renewable-energy projects. Campaigning outside Solyndra's shuttered headquarters in Fremont, Calif., last year,  that the company was a symbol of "the president's failure to understand the basic nature of free enterprise in America."

But amid the right-wing outrage over President Obama's investment choices, we lost sight of what Solyndra's collapse really meant: A boon for solar energy in general.

The state's high court decided without comment Wednesday not to hear an appeal by prosecutors who sought to restore the Madison County jury verdict against Olutosin Oduwole, who was sentenced to five years after being convicted in 2011 of trying to make a terroristic threat.

Oduwole, 27, was released in March after Illinois' 5th District Appellate Court threw out the conviction, ruling prosecutors failed to prove Oduwole actively tried to convey a threat through a questioned slip of paper found in 2007 in his abandoned car at the college he was attending in Edwardsville, Ill., northeast of St. Louis.

Illinois' attorney general asked Illinois' high court to take up the matter, arguing on behalf of Madison County prosecutors that the appellate court overstepped. But the Supreme Court took a pass, and Madison County's state's attorney, Tom Gibbons, announced Thursday no further appeals were planned.

"I'm very pleased ecstatic that the situation has been laid to rest and I can finally go forward without this hanging over my head," Oduwole told The Associated Press by telephone from the Chicago area. "Happy is an understatement."

"I'm not angry, not bitter," he added. "After all the hearings, all the motions, I was just hoping it'd come to the point it is now."

Calling Wednesday's development disappointing, Gibbons was unapologetic for pursuing reinstatement of Oduwole's conviction, saying he stands by the jurors "who determined that the defendant was indeed a threat to the residents of Madison County."

"I was hopeful that the Illinois Supreme Court would have granted us the opportunity to explain the importance of this case in regards to keeping our community safe," Gibbons said in a statement, noting that Oduwole still remained a felon after pleading guilty in late 2011 to computer fraud and theft.

Oduwole said he soon plans to move back to New Jersey, where his father lives, and attend college summer classes for which he already has registered, hoping to close out his business administration degree interrupted by his legal troubles and time in lockup. He anticipates attending graduate school and perhaps launching an independent music label, maintaining that "I'm still a rapper."

It's that very interest that derailed his life.

Oduwole was attending Southern Illinois University's 13,000-student Edwardsville campus in July 2007 when campus police found a piece of paper in his abandoned car, which they had impounded.

The writing demanded payment to a PayPal account, warning "if this account doesn't reach $50,000 in the next seven days then a murderous rampage similar to the VT shooting will occur at another highly populated university. THIS IS NOT A JOKE!"

While referencing the Virginia Tech massacre, which just months earlier had left 32 people dead along with the gunman, the writing did not make any direct reference to targeting the Edwardsville campus.

Oduwole countered through attorneys that the "note" was merely scrap paper with private thoughts, the beginning of a song, never meant to be made public or shared. The appellate court ultimately found it couldn't dispute that and threw out the conviction.

"It was pieces of a rap song that was discarded just something written, forgotten about, crumpled up and thrown away," Oduwole said Thursday of the questioned writings he said were "just taken out of context" by prosecutors. "It became just a lot of frustration, irritation that the prosecution was so hell-bent on creating hysteria and making something out of nothing."

"This concludes the six-year frivolous prosecution of an utterly innocent young man," added Oduwole's attorney, Jeffrey Urdangen. "This has represented the worst possible abuse of prosecutorial authority."

Oduwole said he's learned a lesson: Words rap lyrics or otherwise have power.

"I still continue to make music," he said. "But now I'm a bit more aware of what I'm writing and making sure everything stays away from violence" themes.

Lollobrigida, a leading sex symbol of the 1950s and 1960s, said she was selling the jewelry to raise money for stem cell research.

A pair of diamond and natural pearl earrings sold for 2.29 million francs ($2.37 million), an auction record.

The earrings beat the $1.98 million figure set in 2011 from the sale of natural pearl and diamond earrings by Bulgari, owned by late actress Elizabeth Taylor.

Other prized items from Lollobrigida's collection included a Bulgari necklace and bracelet combination, and a Bulgari ring featuring a 19.03-carat cushion-shaped diamond. Each fetched 749,000 francs ($776,056).

The 85-year-old actress attended the auction and said she hoped the money raised would be put towards advancing stem cell research in Italy.

"Jewels are meant to give pleasure and for many years I had enormous pleasure wearing mine," Lollobrigida said in a statement. "Selling my jewels to help raise awareness of stem cell therapy, which can cure so many illnesses, seems to me a wonderful use to which to put them."

The jewelry was part of Sotheby's "Magnificent Jewels and Nobel Jewels" auction, held in Geneva after going on display in London, New York and Rome.

Overall, the auction of more than 600 lots of gems and jewelry fetched 74.8 million francs ($78.2 million).

Other top-sellers included a late 19th-century 74.53-carat fancy yellow diamond owned by the Imperial Majesty Sultan Ahmad Shah Qajar, the last ruler of the Qajar dynasty in Persia.

It sold for 2.85 million francs ($2.95 million), an auction record for a fancy yellow diamond.

A ring featuring a 27.9-carat brilliant-cut white diamond sold for 4.25 million francs ($4.45 million).

($1 = 0.965 Swiss francs)

(Reporting By Piya Sinha-Roy in Los Angeles; Editing by Eric Kelsey and Xavier Briand)

Despite being ubiquitous, "Android" can be awfully hard to find. Many smartphones and tablets that use Google'ssuch as the Kindle Fire and Samsung's latest phones, barely mention this fact in a footnote.

Android phones often work very differently from each other, such as with the Windows Phone-style home screen on the HTC One. And most come with preinstalled "crapware," put there by the manufacturer or the wireless carrier, which can't be removed and might do things you don't want it to do.

Archos, formerly best known for its Android media player tablets, is making a series of smartphones which goes against that trend.

Carbon and platinum

According to the press release and device comparisonsArchos' new smartphones include the("May be good for a child's first smartphone"), the("actually pretty usable"), and the("the largest of the three"). The names indicate how high-quality they are, as well as their screen size; the 35 Carbon has a 3.5-inch screen, the same as the original iPhone, while the 53 Platinum has a 5.3-inch screen, larger than the Galaxy S 4's.

Not just prepaid, but SIM-free

Archos' Android smartphones will not be tied to any one wireless carrier, the way even the prepaid phones that you buy up front are. (In this respect, they'll be similar to unlocked phones like Google's Nexus 4.) They will also have two SIM card slots, so that you can switch between carriers without needing to pop the case open.

"Pure un-skinned Android OS"

The press release does mention that Archos' phones will include "ARCHOS Media Centre apps," but this is to be expected from a company that used to make media players. Since the "pure" Android experience is a selling point, though, any extra apps shouldn't be as invasive as the ones on (for instance) a Samsung device sold by Verizon.

What about the specs?

The 35 Carbon has entry-level hardware, with a 1 GHz processor and 512 MB of RAM. It only has 4 GB of storage, but has a microSD slot for a memory card. Surprisingly -- for a $99 smartphone -- it has a front-facing camera. But its rear-facing one has the same VGA resolution, which will make for fuzzy, low-res photos. It has a 320x480 screen, and runs Android 4.0 ("Ice Cream Sandwich").

And the Platinum smartphones?

The $200 50 Platinum has (as the name suggests) a 5-inch screen, plus a 1.2 GHz dual-core processor and 1 GB of RAM. The $250, 53 Platinum has the same internals, but a 5.3-inch "phablet"-sized screen.

Both have the same 4 GB of storage (plus microSD) that the 35 Carbon has, but have significantly better cameras. They also run Android 4.1.2 ("Jelly Bean"), a newer version with more features.

When will they be available?

The press release says they "will be available starting in Europe at the end of May." Since there's an American English web page up for each smartphone, a stateside release ought to follow.

Jared Spurbeck is an open-source software enthusiast, who uses an Android phone and an Ubuntu laptop PC. He has been writing about technology and electronics since 2008.

Residents greeted the Democratic candidate at a Harlem subway station with handshakes and plenty of concerns about teacher contracts, manufacturing jobs, the problems of the mentally ill and other public policy issues. But not about the risque tweets and obfuscating explanations that have largely defined his image for the last two years.

Weiner seemed to relish his first time stumping since his last congressional re-election race in 2010, answering voters and a throng of reporters with a combination of enthusiasm about airing his ideas for the city, humility about his past transgressions and occasional flashes of the wisecracking demeanor for which he was known in Washington. When one reporter asked how voters had embraced him so far, Weiner asked one of the residents in the crowd, Linda Smalls, for a hug.

"This is how they've embraced me," he said.

"If citizens want to talk to me about my personal failings, that's their right, and I'm going to do everything I can to answer them," he said a few minutes later. But "frankly, I think most New Yorkers, particularly those in the middle class in communities like this, they want to talk about the solutions to the challenges that New York City faces. That's what they care about, and I want to try to provide some answers."

After about a month of maybes, Weiner officially launched his comeback campaign with a video posted online late Tuesday. However he does when the polls close, he's certain to add drama to the heated race to succeed term-limited Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Weiner, a former councilman and seven-term congressman, ran for mayor in 2005 and nearly did in 2009. He's getting into this year's race with a $4.8 million campaign war chest and the possibility of $1 million more in public matching money. A Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday found Weiner getting 15 percent of the Democratic primary vote, behind all other Democratic contenders except City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, with 25 percent.

Outside the subway station Thursday, Smalls said she'd vote for Weiner "because I like the work that he's done in the past.

"Even though he made a mistake, you know, we're human. He's human. He apologized for it, and it's time to move on," she said, though she couldn't resist a wink at his notoriety: "Instead of a hug, I really wanted a text," she joked.

With less than four months left before the primary, Weiner also is confronting some clear challenges.

The Quinnipiac poll found 49 percent of city voters think he shouldn't even run. He has only recently hired campaign staffers, and some influential players in Democratic politics have already endorsed other contenders. Weiner said he'd made calls Wednesday to some community leaders and officials to tell them about his candidacy but didn't ask them for endorsements.

And the scandal that forced him from office continues to spur questions. During an interview Thursday with WNYC-AM radio, he said he wouldn't again make such mistakes "I have put these things behind me" but he said it was possible that more of his past messages might emerge if recipients chose to come forward now.

After a photo of a man's bulging underpants appeared on Weiner's Twitter account in 2011, he initially claimed his account had been hacked. Then more risque photos surfaced, including one of him bare-chested in his congressional office, and the married congressman ultimately acknowledged exchanging inappropriate messages with several women and resigned.

"It was simply a blind spot. It was a thoughtlessness that I had about my private behavior," he told WNYC Thursday, reiterating that he lied about the tweets because he didn't want his then-pregnant wife, Huma Abedin, to find out about them.

She has said she has forgiven him, a message reified in a campaign announcement video that opened with the two feeding their toddler son.

For Weiner's campaign, it's key to "be extremely honest and demonstrate that the most important person in his life has forgiven him," in the hopes that voters will also, Pace University political scientist Gregory Julian said.

Weiner is positioning himself as a champion for the middle class and those working to get there. His proposals range from creating a city-run, single-payer health system for the uninsured he'd use Medicaid money to pay for it to sending vans to shopping centers so business owners needn't trek to city offices to contest fines. He was due to face some of his opponents for the first time at a Democratic candidate forum Thursday evening.

Some of his rivals have said they welcome him to the race, including Democratic former City Comptroller William Thompson, whose campaign used Weiner's arrival as a jumping-off point for a fundraising email. But others quickly started leveling criticisms, including Democratic former City Councilman Sal Albanese and Republican John Catsimatidis, who both rapped Weiner as a "career politician."

___

Follow Jennifer Peltz at http://twitter.com/jennpeltz

It has long been a mystery exactly what causes the formation of cirrus clouds, the wispy billows of ice that can be seen high in the sky. But new research, detailed in the May 9 issue of the journal Science, finds that theand freeze, or nucleate, on very specific mineral and metal particles high in the atmosphere. That makes cirrus clouds unique: Most other clouds form primarily by , said study author Dan Cziczo, an atmospheric chemist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

It's important to know how these clouds form, as they can cover up to 30 percent of the Earth's atmosphere at any given time, and have a big effect on the climate, Cziczo told OurAmazingPlanet.

Clouds and climate

In fact, clouds have about 10 times the impact on climate that man-made greenhouse-gas emissions do, said Brian Toon, a researcher at the University of Colorado at Boulder who wasn't involved in the study. "The largest uncertainty in understanding climate change is understanding clouds, since they are so much more important," he said. []

The new study shows, however, that humans actually impact the formation of cirrus clouds (just asand vice versa, in little-understood ways), by sampling the ice crystals making up the clouds and seeing what particles they formed on. Although mineral particles have always found their way into the upper atmosphere, where cirrus clouds hang out, humans have increased the amount of mineral dust that arrives there through land-use changes such as deforestation and land development, Toon said. Cziczo estimates that the level of these minerals has increased by about 50 percent since the beginning of industrialization. Metallic particles are also introduced by humans through the burning of fossil fuels and other industrial activities, he said.

But how does this affect the amount or size of ? It's too early to say, Cziczo said, but the data from the study will help improve computer models of climate change. Toon said more mineral particles kicked up by humans could equate to more cirrus clouds, although there are many other factors that complicate the situation.

It's also unclear how cirrus clouds might affect the climate. Depending on their location in the atmosphere, they can either help cool the Earth or warm it up. Unlike liquid water clouds, which generally cool the Earth by reflecting sunlight, ice clouds can help warm it up by absorbing reflected heat, Toon said.

Particle man

Cirrus clouds are unique in that they are made up of ice crystals, whereas most other clouds contain condensed droplets of liquid water. When most people think of clouds, they picture these liquid water clouds, which exist closer to the Earth's surface and are responsible for rainstorms and other weather, Cziczo said.

Like all clouds, water clouds need particles upon which to condense. Recent research has shown that these , sulfates (chemicals emitted by volcanoes and human activity) and other organic materials, Cziczo said. As this study shows, however, cirrus clouds need very specific particles upon which to nucleate and freeze.

Analyzing chemicals within high-altitude ice crystals is no easy task. To do so, Cziczo and his colleagues partnered with NASA to use two of its research airplanes. Up in the air, they used a device called a counterflow virtual impactor. This device acts like a hair dryer, Cziczo said.

"The inlet flows gas out the front of the plane. This stops the small particles we don't want to sample and only lets in the big ice crystals, he explained. You can imagine that if you drop a Ping-Pong ball on a hair dryer, the flow of air stops the Ping-Pong ball. But if you drop a bowling ball on the hair dryer, it has no effect. Same thing for particles versus ice crystals."

The warm air then melted the ice, and the researchers analyzed the particles using a mass spectrometer they took up in the airplane with them, Cziczo said.

Email or follow him onor . Follow us , or . Original article on LiveScience's OurAmazingPlanet.

The company says the Xbox One, its next-generation entertainment console, will go on sale later this year.

The company is seeking to stay ahead of rivals in announcing that new content that can be downloaded for the popular "Call of Duty" game will launch first on Xbox One.

Microsoft says more games will be shown at next month's E3 video game conference in Los Angeles.

Microsoft executives are also touting the Xbox One as a replacement for the set-top box from your cable provider. It has its own guide and you can change channels by voice command.

The announcement came Tuesday at a presentation at its headquarters in Redmond, Wash.