It's possible, suggests a new study, which finds that as climates warm around the world, plants may respond by releasing more aerosol particles into the atmosphere.

The research, published online April 28 in the journal Nature Geoscience, finds that these natural aerosols can fuel cloud formation, which may help cool a warming climate. []

Aerosols are fine particles of solid or liquid matter, suspended in air. Most of the aerosol particles in Earth's atmosphere come from human activities such as vehicle exhaust, according to the environmental blog . Volcanic eruptions also contribute some aerosols to the atmosphere.

But a small percentage of atmospheric aerosols come from living plants, according to a news release from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), which co-sponsored the study.

Plants release gases such as water vapor and oxygen; these combine with the aerosols released from plants to form larger airborne particles that reflect sunlight and form cloud droplets.

"Everyone knows the scent of the forest," Ari Asmi, University of Helsinki researcher and co-author of the study, said in a statement. "That scent is made up of these gases."

To measure the cooling effect, researchers collected data from 11 sites around the world, measuring aerosol particle concentrations, plant gases and temperatures.

In warmer temperatures, it was revealed, plants emit more of the gases that stick to aerosol particles. These can lead to cloud formation and, as a result of cloud cover, cooler temperatures.

Other natural phenomenon may help to cool the planet: Some researchers believe that microscopic plants that drift on ocean currents may reduce carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and lower the atmosphere's temperature.

Other research finds that , which also absorb massive amounts of carbon dioxide and release water vapor that forms clouds, are critical to stabilizing atmospheric temperatures.

It's unclear how much cooling might actually occur as a result of so-called "biogenic" aerosols.

"This does not save us from climate warming," Pauli Paasonen, lead author of the study, said in the release.

Though in some areas, such as the forests of Finland and Canada, the cooling effect can be as large as 30 percent, the overall global effect is very small, offsetting only about 1 percent of global warming, according to the study.

Nonetheless, the impact of plant-based aerosol formation is an important element in fine-tuning climate forecast models, the researchers believe.

"Aerosol effects on climate are one of the main uncertainties in climate models," Paasonen said in the release. "Understanding this mechanism could help us reduce those uncertainties and make the models better."

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Carbon dioxide was measured at 400 parts per million at the oldest monitoring station which is in Hawaii sets the global benchmark. The last time the worldwide carbon level was probably that high was about 2 million years ago, said Pieter Tans of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

That was during the Pleistocene Era. "It was much warmer than it is today," Tans said. "There were forests in Greenland. Sea level was higher, between 10 and 20 meters (33 to 66 feet)."

Other scientists say it may have been 10 million years ago that Earth last encountered this much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The first modern humans only appeared in Africa about 200,000 years ago.

The measurement was recorded Thursday and it is only a daily figure, the monthly and yearly average will be smaller. The number 400 has been anticipated by climate scientists and environmental activists for years as a notable indicator, in part because it's a round number not because any changes in man-made global warming happen by reaching it.

"Physically, we are no worse off at 400 ppm than we were at 399 ppm," Princeton University climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer said. "But as a symbol of the painfully slow pace of measures to avoid a dangerous level of warming, it's somewhat unnerving."

Environmental activists, such as former Vice President Al Gore, seized on the milestone.

"This number is a reminder that for the last 150 years and especially over the last several decades we have been recklessly polluting the protective sheath of atmosphere that surrounds the Earth and protects the conditions that have fostered the flourishing of our civilization," Gore said in a statement. "We are altering the composition of our atmosphere at an unprecedented rate."

Carbon dioxide traps heat just like in a greenhouse and most of it stays in the air for a century; some lasts for thousands of years, scientists say. It accounts for three-quarters of the planet's heat-trapping gases. There are others, such as methane, which has a shorter life span but traps heat more effectively. Both trigger temperatures to rise over time, scientists say, which is causing sea levels to rise and some weather patterns to change.

When measurements of carbon dioxide were first taken in 1958, it measured 315 parts per million. Some scientists and environmental groups promote 350 parts per million as a safe level for CO2, but scientists acknowledge they don't really know what levels would stop the effects of global warming.

The level of carbon dioxide in the air is rising faster than in the past decades, despite international efforts by developed nations to curb it. On average the amount is growing by about 2 parts per million per year. That's 100 times faster than at the end of the Ice Age.

Back then, it took 7,000 years for carbon dioxide to reach 80 parts per million, Tans said. Because of the burning of fossil fuels, such as oil and coal, carbon dioxide levels have gone up by that amount in just 55 years.

Before the Industrial Revolution, carbon dioxide levels were around 280 ppm, and they were closer to 200 during the Ice Age, which is when sea levels shrank and polar places went from green to icy. There are natural ups and downs of this greenhouse gas, which comes from volcanoes and decomposing plants and animals. But that's not what has driven current levels so high, Tans said. He said the amount should be even higher, but the world's oceans are absorbing quite a bit, keeping it out of the air.

"What we see today is 100 percent due to human activity," said Tans, a NOAA senior scientist. The burning of fossil fuels, such as coal for electricity and oil for gasoline, has caused the overwhelming bulk of the man-made increase in carbon in the air, scientists say.

The world pumps on average 2.4 million pounds of carbon dioxide into the air every second for a total of 38.2 billion tons in 2011, according international calculations published in a scientific journal in December. China spews 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the air per year, leading all countries, and its emissions are growing about 10 percent annually. The U.S. at No. 2 is slowly cutting emissions and is down to 5.9 billion tons per year.

The speed of the change is the big worry, said Pennsylvania State University climate scientist Michael Mann. If carbon dioxide levels go up 100 parts per million over thousands or millions of years, plants and animals can adapt. But that can't be done at the speed it is now happening.

Last year, regional monitors briefly hit 400 ppm in the Arctic. But those monitoring stations aren't seen as a world mark like the one at Mauna Loa, Hawaii.

Generally carbon levels peak in May then fall slightly, so the yearly average is usually a few parts per million lower than May levels.

___

Online:

NOAA monitoring at Mauna Loa: http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/weekly.html

Seth Borenstein can be followed at http://twitter.com/borenbears

Among the deaths, two occurred in the eastern province of Jiangsu; one was from eastern Zhejiang; while another was from central Anhui, based on a Reuters analysis of the data provided by Chinese health authorities on Monday.

The government did not provide more details of the victims.

Chinese health authorities said two new infections were reported in the eastern coastal province of Fujian. The virus, which was mostly concentrated in the region around the commercial capital of Shanghai, spread to Fujian in late April.

The Geneva-based World Health Organization (WHO) has said it has no evidence that the new strain of bird flu, which was first detected in patients in China in March, is easily transmissible between humans.

Chinese scientists have confirmed that the H7N9 strain has been transmitted to humans from chickens. But the WHO has said 40 percent of people infected with H7N9 appear to have had no contact with poultry.

The head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the current strain of bird flu cannot spark a pandemic in its current form - but he added that there is no guarantee it will not mutate and cause a serious pandemic.

(Reporting by Sui-Lee Wee; Editing by Michael Perry)

In the latest business year that ended on March 31, the creator of Super Mario sold 3.45 million of its successor to the hit Wii machine. It initially forecast sales of 5.5 million but later lowered that to 4 million.

Nintendo, which began by making playing cards in the late 19th century, is counting on the Wii U, its first console in 16 years to come with a dedicated Super Mario game title, to revive its fortunes as sales of the six year-old Wii slacken.

The Japanese gaming company forecast sales of its handheld 3DS console to rise nearly 30 percent to 18 million.

(Reporting by Tim Kelly; Editing by Edmund Klamann)

I Touch Myself is a perfectly respectable pop song that I certainly dont mind hearing, but when I think of the Divinyls I think first of the edgier iteration of the band that I stumbled upon somewhere around 1984. I was a small-town teenager then, a music fan slightly obsessed with unearthing bands that hadnt made it to commercial radio. This was a common enough condition and still is, I assume. The difference is that back then it was harder to do something about it. I knew about MTV but we didnt have cable; Im pretty sure the only music magazine I read was Rolling Stone; there was no web search.

I encountered the Divinyls by way of a show called Rock & Roll Tonite. Where I lived, it aired in the middle of the night, and basically consisted of short live sets by bands that hadnt (yet, in some cases) gone mainstream. I remember learning of Sparks and the Plimsouls, among others, through that show. Amphlett made quite an impression on me, particularly in a set-closing performance of a song called deadpan-tough stage demeanor, schoolgirl dress, lipstick smeared across her face and arms. Delightfully weird, in other words. I promptly tracked down the bands first record, and remained a fan. That specific rendition of Boys In Town, however, remained available to me only by way of memory.

Until yesterday, of course. The truth is, I couldnt quite recall the name of the song, how it went, or the title of the show where I saw the band perform it. I have magically recovered all those details in the paragraph above because along with the restless music-loving teens of the 21st Century I have near-instant access to a practically infinite entertainment data set.

First stop, : Naturally the completeis there, and I spent some happy minutes revisiting song titles that released fresh earworms to crowd out I Touch Myself. Nothing was quite ringing the proper bell, but feeding song titles into YouTube, and clicking on results connected to live performances, moved me down the path. This clip of theconfirmed that I had the right song but, while a cool rendition, not the one in my memory.

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Within seconds of the fracas, the Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeted 145 points (see the graphic below) before picking itself back up a few minutes later.  took a close look at how the nosedive was implicated by technology — sophisticated computer-trading software that monitors news headlines, corporate announcements, and yes, even social media to make buy or sell decisions in fractions of a second. Welcome to the world of algorithm-based decision-making.

The Journal's Geoffrey Rogow and Telis Demos :

The technology has been around for several years, but it is increasingly finding adherents among financial firms, including hedge funds, investment banks, and even long-term investors such as mutual-fund companies. Experts say traders use the data for just about every kind of investment around the world, from U.S. stocks to the Korean won. []

Once Dataminr's distress signals were received, the firms' proprietary software exploded into action, ready to sell. The whole process occurred in the blink of an eye. 

— which publishes The Journal — claims these "elementized" news feeds "cut execution times and perform deeper analysis" than traditional methods. In addition to scanning hundreds of millions of tweets and headlines, they take into account several additional factors, including the reputation of a news source (in this case a tweet from the AP's confirmed account) and a tweet's geo-location. Media firms, including Dow Jones, Bloomberg, and Reuters, have been using elementized news feeds in some capacity since 2006.

And while it may feel gratifying to point fingers at the machines' mathematical inability to preemptively sniff out a hoax, The Journalthat Dataminr's computers were quick to right a wrong. A second alert warning clients that the initial news may not have been accurate was sent out almost immediately, even before the AP had a chance to announce it had been hacked. Five minutes after the fake White House explosion sent the market into free fall, "shares rebounded across the board, and the blue-chip index ended the day with gains greater than before the incident."

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CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - A pair of Russian cosmonauts wrapped up a 6-1/2 hour spacewalk outside the International Space Station on Friday, the first of up to eight outings this year to install experiments and prepare the orbital outpost for a new module, officials said.

Flight engineers Pavel Vinogradov, 59, a veteran of seven spacewalks and Roman Romanenko, 41, a second-generation cosmonaut on his debut spacewalk, floated outside the station's airlock at 10:03 a.m. EDT/1403 GMT as the station soared 262 miles over the southern Pacific Ocean.

The primary purpose of the 6-1/2 hour excursion was to set up an experiment that monitors plasma waves in Earth's ionosphere, the outer layer of the planet's atmosphere that extends to about 370 miles into space.

Instruments on two boxes attached to handrails on the forward portion of the station's Zvezda module will measure low-frequency electromagnetic radiation, which, among other triggers, has been tied to earthquakes.

At the other end of the Zvezda module, Vinogradov and Romanenko replaced a faulty laser retroreflector that is part of an automated docking system used by the European Space Agency's cargo transports. The next ship is due to launch in June.

Before heading back into the station, the cosmonauts retrieved another experiment designed to study how microbes affect spacecraft structures and whether microbes are affected by solar activity.

The day's only glitch occurred just before the men wrapped up their six-hour, 38-minute spacewalk. Vinogradov lost his grip on a science experiment that was slated to be returned to Earth. It floated away in the gravity-free world of space.

The lost aluminum panel, which measured about 18 inches by 12 inches and weighed about 6.5 pounds (3 kg), had been anchored outside the station to test how various metals wear in the harsh space environment.

It floated off in the direction of the Zvezda module's solar arrays, but engineers determined it did not hit or threaten the station, NASA mission commentator Rob Navias said.

A second panel remains attached to the outside of the station and is slated to be retrieved on a later spacewalk.

"So all is not lost," Navias said. "It was a minor fly in the ointment to what has been a successful spaceflight up that moment."

While his crewmates worked outside, station commander Chris Hadfield, a Canadian astronaut, had the less glamorous task of replacing a pump separator in one of the station's toilets.

Two more spacewalks by Russian cosmonauts are scheduled for June to prepare for the arrival of a Russian laboratory and docking module that is to be launched in December.

The station, which is staffed by rotating crews of six astronauts and cosmonauts, is a $100 billion research outpost owned by the United States and Russia in partnership with Europe, Japan and Canada.

(Editing by Eric Walsh, Kevin Gray and Stacey Joyce)