March 6, 2013 – CALIFORNIA– Authorities say a foul odor that spurred calls to fire departments throughout the city on Sunday is possibly the result of the large release of methane in the Santa Monica Bay. Santa Monica Fire said in a department statement that they believe the strong odor was caused by a naturally occurring methane leak below the ocean floor. “This morning there was a large release of natural ocean floor methane released in the Santa Monica Bay,” the statement said. Brian Humphrey, a spokesman for the Los Angeles City Fire Department, said the odor was noted inland from the Santa Monica Bay. Santa Monica fire haz-mat crews detected rather unusual concentrations of odorless methane gas in the air that they believed to be coming from either a patch of pungent algae, or a sulfurous gas-laced methane bubble, said a dispatcher. That may night be the case…

March 5, 2013 – CLIMATE – Sulfur dioxide emissions from moderate volcanoes around the world can mask some of the effects of global warming by 25 percent, a new study has found. A team led by the University of Colorado Boulder looking for clues about why Earth did not warm as much as scientists expected between 2000 and 2010 now thinks the culprits are hiding in plain sight. The study results essentially exonerate India and China, two countries that are estimated to have increased their industrial sulfur dioxide emissions by about 60 percent from 2000 to 2010 through coal burning, said lead study author Ryan Neely. Small amounts of sulfur dioxide emissions from Earth’s surface eventually rise 12 to 20 miles into the stratospheric aerosol layer of the atmosphere, where chemical reactions create sulfuric acid and water particles that reflect sunlight back to space, cooling the planet, researchers said. Neely…

From LiveScience:

Half-Million-Year-Old Human Jawbone Found

Tia Ghose, LiveScience Staff Writer

Date: 06 February 2013 Time: 05:00 PM ET

Scientists have unearthed a jawbone from an ancient human ancestor in a cave in Serbia.

The jawbone, which may have come from an ancient Homo erectus or a primitive-looking Neanderthal precursor, is more than 397,000 years old, and possibly more than 525,000 years old. The fossil, described today (Feb. 6) in the journal PLOS ONE, is the oldest hominin fossil found in this region of Europe, and may change the view that Neanderthals, our closest extinct human relatives, evolved throughout Europe around that time.

“It comes from an area where we basically don’t have anything that is known and well-published,” said study co-author Mirjana Roksandic, a bioarchaeologist from the University of Winnipeg in Canada. “Now we have something to start constructing a picture of what’s happening in…