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What it's about:
The science-and-nature-focused documentary series Seek Out Natural Mysteries depicts the four unsolved mysteries in nature.

The Origin of Life
Since the theory of evolution was proposed, scientists have been facing an ultimate puzzle: How did the first life form? There are strong arguments for and against all competing theories (community clay, deep-sea hydrothermal vents, panspermia…), but what should a valid theory account for?

Species Extinction
There have been five mass extinction events in Earth's history. And we are now experiencing the precipice moment of the sixth mass extinction. Think critically about what caused the catastrophic events in the past and what could be causing one now.

Light Curves
A bizarre cosmic object known as "Tabby's star", also known as Boyajian's star or KIC 8462852, exhibits strange change in brightness. It has generated great sensation and speculation since 2015. But scientists cannot seem to figure out exactly why.

Ball Lightning
Researchers from Lanzhou, China's Northwest Normal University inadvertently recorded the elusive glowing orbs during a thunderstorm, when they were mapping radiation. Video and spectrographs of this lightning event are thought to be the first ever and the only scientific recordings of ball lightning in nature.

Why you should see it:
1-year arrangement, 13 journeys, 50-day live shots, and 100-day post production, all combined to show you a 150-minute convincing-and-compelling work. We not only want to present you with four fascinating natural riddles in a refreshing way, but also would like to introduce you those outstanding Chinese scientists and China's little-known past related to science. Science has no nationality. We hope you can join us and participate in science if this sincere work can inspire you, jointly we can spread scientific knowledge and the scientific spirit, and ultimately seek truth wherever we can find it.

Director & Host: Jie Wang
Jie Wang in Chinese sounds like “诘问”, which means “cross-examine evidence to seek out truth”. Jie is a well-known popular science commentator and communicator in China. Jie's hardworking and productive. His masterpiece The Shape of Time (Historical Story about Relativity) won the eighth annual Wenjin Award, China's national-level comprehensive book award to encourage public reading. His science fiction novel The Cage of Time won the eighteenth Hundred Flowers Awards for Literary, one of the most professional and authoritative awards on the Chinese mainland. Jie's self-media radio station Science Has Stories was prized top 10 commercial technology anchors in 2018 and the most commercially valuable anchor in 2019 in Himalaya FM, a Chinese pioneer in live-streaming broadcasts, audiobooks and podcasts. Jie also acts as the executive secretary of Voice of Science, a science media league to popularize scientific knowledge and disseminate scientific spirit. Voice of Science takes its mission to improve people's scientific literacy, advocate logic and empirical evidence, oppose pseudoscience, and eliminate ignorance and superstition.

The Origin of Life
Part 1: Reproduce the Moment of Life Creation. Where did we come from? To come up with a convincing scientific explanation, it is necessary to reproduce the great moment of life creation in the laboratory. The Miller-Urey experiment caused great repercussions as people thought they had found the missing prologue of evolution theory. However, can life really crawl out of the test tube?

Part 2: The Convincing Black Smoker Chimney Hypothesis. Since their discovery, deep sea hydrothermal vents have been suggested as the birthplace of life. Geologists have discovered 1.43 billion-year-old fossils of deep-sea microbes in ancient black smoker chimneys, which they unearthed in a Chinese mine, providing more evidence that life may have originated on the bottom of the ocean.

Part 3: Life on Earth May Have Begun in Hostile Hot Springs. But not everyone is convinced that life started in the sea. Mounting evidence from rocks and biofilms points towards life's origin on land at volcanic hot springs and pools like the erupting geysers and steaming pools. The fate of a theory doesn't depend on the endorsement of certain authority or support from some ideology. It's always about convincing evidence.

Species Extinction
Part I: The Five Mass Extinctions That Have Swept Our Planet. It was Cuvier who firmly established the fact of the extinction of past lifeforms. Scientists then found out that there have been five mass extinction events in Earth's history. In the worst one, 250 million years ago, 96 percent of marine species and 70 percent of land species died off. It took millions of years to recover. Then what caused mass extinctions and how did those lucky species survive the catastrophe?

Part II: Sixth Extinction: Present and Future? Across time and around the planet, extinctions of one or another individual species are always occurring. Known as the “background rate” and documented both historically and in the fossil record, these extinctions are like low-volume static compared with the sudden cymbal crash of a mass die-off. Determining extinction rates as they are unfolding is difficult, but a 2015 Science Advances study, using a range of conservative estimates, placed the current pace at up to 100 times the normal background rate. Human activities are to blame, including population growth, increased resource consumption and climate change spurred by fossil fuel burning and the release of greenhouse gases. Homo sapiens might not only be the agent of the sixth extinction, but also risks being one of its victims.

Light Curves
Part I: The Most Mysterious Star in the Galaxy. The star, called KIC 8462852 and nicknamed “Tabby's Star” after Yale University astronomer Tabetha “Tabby” Boyajian, first made news in 2015 when researchers discovered something odd about its light. These dimming events are far too substantial to be caused by planets crossing the face of the star, so scientists looked for other explanations. Some have even suggested that it might host signs of intelligent alien life—specifically, a Dyson Sphere, a hypothetical megastructure built around a star to capture as much of its energy as possible to power an advanced civilization.

Part II: What Explanation Can Solve the Puzzle of Tabby's Star? The realization that the star sometimes gets brighter in addition to periods of dimming is incompatible with most hypotheses to explain its weird behavior. It remains unknown how long the light curve might last. Could this just be the beginning?

Ball Lightning
Storyline: Part I: Eyewitness Reports of the Unusual Phenomena: Ball Lightning. Ball lightning is a well-documented phenomenon in the sense that it has been seen and consistently described by people in all walks of life since the time of the ancient Greeks. It is in general described as a luminous sphere, most often the size of a small child's head. It appears usually during thunderstorms, sometimes within a few seconds of lightning but sometimes without apparent connection to a lightning bolt. Its lifetime varies widely, ranging from a few seconds to several minutes. The lifetime of ball lightning tends to increase with size and decrease with brightness. The scientific community is increasingly convinced that ball lightning is a real phenomenon (although there remain some skeptics). What could cause ball lightning, on the other hand, is a source of steady controversy.

Part II: Chinese Researchers Measured a Spectrum of Light Emitted by the Rare and Elusive Ball Lightning. Ball lightning has been one of the most mysterious natural phenomena for centuries, partly because it is so rare and transient and therefore hard to investigate. But a fortuitous observation during field experiments in China to study ordinary lightning, reported in Physical Review Letters, has now provided what seems to be the first measurement of the emission spectrum of ball lightning. The data suggest that the glowing ball was composed of elements from soil, consistent with one popular theory. One popular theory is that ball lightning is caused when lightning striking the ground vaporizes some of the silicate minerals in soil. Carbon in the soil strips the silicates of oxygen through chemical reactions, creating a gas of energetic silicon atoms. These then recombine to form nanoparticles or filaments, while still floating in air, react with oxygen, releasing heat and emitting the glow. If that's so, one should expect to see atomic emission lines of silicon and other soil elements in the spectrum. That is what Ping Yuan and co-workers from Northwest Normal University in Lanzhou, China, reported.

Part III: A new Hypothesis Proposed by a Chinese Scientist on the Origin of Ball Lightning. Sometimes, under certain conditions, a small and relatively spherical slice of the atmosphere which surrounds us, for a short while lights up. These balls of fire are called wandering lights, St. Elmo's fire, Ghost lights or ball lightning. Even today we have no clear explanation of how they arise and what they do. But this does not mean that scientists have given up trying to figure it out. In June 2016, the Chinese scholar Huichun Wu proposed a new, convincing explanation of this phenomenon by publishing an article in the journal Scientific Reports. According to Wu, if the hypothesis is confirmed, his theory would ...