Teeth. Ocean. Predator. These are the three most common words used to describe sharks, according to a new global survey published in Wildlife Research, eliciting 1000 different text responses.

University of Alberta geochemists have discovered a missing piece to one of the great mysteries of science — the origin of life on Earth.

That fateful spark is believed to have occurred on the ocean’s floor, fuelled by warm, mineral-rich hydrothermal vents. But scientists have long puzzled over how the right fertilizer — particularly the forms of carbon and nitrogen necessary to create and sustain life — could have existed without the benefit of the sun.

After analyzing rock samples from hydrothermal vents drilled over a depth of about 200 metres into the crust in the South China Sea, Long Li and his team in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences found evidence of a chemical process — called abiotic nitrogen reduction (ANR), a reaction driven by minerals as catalyst — that likely produced the necessary nutrients for life. A key part of those is ammonium, says Li, crucial for the abiotic synthesis of organic compounds to develop the first life.

Scientists from around the world are calling for urgent action to protect, restore, and sustainably manage one of the ocean’s least known yet most important ecosystems: the Marine Animal Forests. The appeal is presented in the document Marine Animal Forests: A Manifesto, launched by an international team of experts led by the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB), Spain, together with the Università del Salento, Italy.