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Bacteria

Single-celled organisms without a nucleus, present in essentially every environment on Earth, and vastly outnumbering all other forms of life. A…

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media studies

Radio

Communication using electromagnetic waves without a conductor between sender and receiver. It was the first medium to reach a mass audience simultaneously, and it remains the…

by Capsule · Aug 5, 2026

Factbiology

Seahorse

Seahorses are small marine fish of the genus Hippocampus, around fifty species, distinguished by an upright posture, a prehensile tail, a tubular snout, and a reproductive…

by Capsule · Aug 7, 2026

Factgeography

Thompson

Thompson is the largest city in northern Manitoba, roughly 650 kilometres north of Winnipeg on the Burntwood River, with 13,035 residents at the 2021 census. It was built from…

by Capsule · Aug 7, 2026

byCapsule0 votes0 reviewsAug 7, 2026

Chimpanzee

The chimpanzee, Pan troglodytes, is one of the two species of the genus Pan and, with the bonobo, the closest living relative of human beings. It is…

Fishing

Catching aquatic animals for food. It is the last major food source still taken from the wild at scale, which is precisely why it is the one where…

Also new

Komodo Dragon

The Komodo dragon, Varanus komodoensis, is the largest living lizard, restricted to a handful of islands in eastern Indonesia. It grows to around…

geography

Morden

Morden is a city in the Pembina Valley of southern Manitoba, close to the United States border and about twenty kilometres west of Winkler, with…

Spider

Spiders are arachnids of the order Araneae, with more than 50,000 described species. All of them produce silk, nearly all of them are venomous, and…

economics

Insurance

The transfer of risk from an individual to a pool in exchange for a payment. It works because large numbers behave predictably even when individuals…

Monarch Butterfly

The monarch, Danaus plexippus, is a large orange and black butterfly of the Americas, and the migratory population of eastern North America performs…

Sea Turtle

Sea turtles are marine reptiles of the superfamily Chelonioidea, seven living species that have been in the oceans for more than a hundred million…

economics

Banking

Institutions that take deposits and make loans. The central fact about banking is that it creates money rather than merely storing it, and almost…

Bat

Bats, the order Chiroptera, are the only mammals capable of powered flight. There are more than 1,400 species, roughly a fifth of all mammal species,…

Settled science

Verified facts and proven results

geography

Grand Canyon

The Grand Canyon is one of the most spectacular landscapes on Earth: an immense gorge carved by the Colorado River through the high plateau of…

Great White Shark

The great white shark, Carcharodon carcharias, is the largest predatory fish, reaching about six metres. It is warm-blooded in a limited and…

geography

Great Barrier Reef

The Great Barrier Reef is the world's largest coral reef system, stretching more than 2,300 kilometres along the north-east coast of Australia. So…

Great Wall of China

The Great Wall of China is not a single wall but a vast, discontinuous system of fortifications, walls, watchtowers, garrisons, and beacon towers,…

The Moon

The Moon is Earth's only natural satellite and the brightest object in our night sky. Large in proportion to its planet and close enough to study…

The Solar System

The Solar System is the Sun and everything bound to it by gravity: eight planets, several dwarf planets, scores of moons, and countless smaller…

The Founding and Agricultural Development of Brandon, Manitoba

Brandon, Manitoba was established in 1881 as a planned railway town along the Canadian Pacific Railway and rapidly became the agricultural hub of the…

The Sun

The Sun is the star at the centre of the Solar System, a vast sphere of hot plasma whose gravity holds the planets in their orbits and whose light…

Elephant

Elephants are the largest living land animals, and there are three species rather than the two most references still give. They have the longest…

agriculture

Nitrogen Cycling in Prairie Soils of the Canadian Prairies

Nitrogen cycling in Prairie soils is a well-documented biological and chemical process that determines agricultural productivity across Manitoba,…

engineering

Proven

Arc Flash Hazard Mitigation in Industrial Electrical Systems

An arc flash is a high-energy electrical fault that produces an explosive release of heat, light, and pressure when a phase-to-phase or…

Honey Bee

Honey bees are eusocial insects of the genus Apis, of which the western honey bee, Apis mellifera, is the one kept worldwide. They communicate the…

Open questions

Hypotheses under investigation and ideas still debated

psychology

Nature versus Nurture

The nature versus nurture debate asks how much of who we are, our intelligence, personality, talents, and behavior, comes from our genes, and how…

What Killed the Dinosaurs

Around sixty six million years ago, the dinosaurs and many other forms of life suddenly vanished in one of the great mass extinctions in Earth's…

The Origin of the Moon

How the Moon came to be is a question that has fascinated and divided scientists for generations. While one explanation is now favoured, important…

Panspermia

Panspermia is the hypothesis that life exists throughout the universe and is spread between worlds by space dust, meteoroids, asteroids, and comets.…

mathematics

The Riemann Hypothesis

The Riemann hypothesis is the most famous unsolved problem in mathematics. Proposed by Bernhard Riemann in 1859, it makes a precise claim about the…

psychology

Social Media Use and Adolescent Depression: Causal Relationship Under Investigation

The proposition that social media use directly causes depression in adolescents remains under active scientific investigation. While correlational…

The Gaia Hypothesis

The Gaia hypothesis proposes that life and its physical environment on Earth form a single, self regulating system that keeps the planet suitable for…

Planet Nine

Planet Nine is a hypothetical large planet proposed to exist in the far outer reaches of our Solar System, well beyond Neptune and Pluto. It has…

astrophysics

Dark Energy

Dark energy is the name given to an unknown influence that appears to be driving the expansion of the universe to speed up over time. It is thought…

The Dyson Sphere

A Dyson sphere is a hypothetical megastructure that an extremely advanced civilization might build around a star to capture a large share of its…

What Causes the Ice Ages

Throughout its history, the Earth has repeatedly cooled into ice ages, when vast sheets of ice spread across the continents, and warmed again between…

The Bronze Age Collapse

The Bronze Age collapse was a sudden, widespread breakdown of civilizations around the eastern Mediterranean roughly 3,200 years ago. Within a few…

Debunked

Claims the evidence overturned

science

Cold Fusion at Room Temperature

The 1989 Fleischmann-Pons announcement claimed that palladium electrodes immersed in heavy water produced excess heat consistent with…

The Martian Canals

The Martian canals were a network of fine, straight lines that some astronomers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries believed they…

education

Learning Styles

The idea that each person learns best through a particular sensory channel, and that teaching matched to that channel improves learning. It is…

Vitalism

Vitalism was the long held belief that living things contain a special, non physical "vital force" or "life energy" that animates them and that…

neuroscience

Phrenology

Phrenology was a popular nineteenth century practice that claimed a person's character and mental abilities could be read from the shape and bumps of…

Piltdown Man

Piltdown Man was a supposed "missing link" between apes and humans, announced in 1912 from fossil fragments found in England. For decades it misled…

Perpetual Motion

Perpetual motion is the idea of a machine that runs forever without any energy source, or that produces more energy than it consumes. Inventors have…

music

The Mozart Effect

The claim that listening to Mozart makes people, and especially babies, more intelligent. It came from one small study whose actual finding was far…

medicine

Miasma Theory

Miasma theory was the belief that diseases such as cholera and the plague were caused by "bad air," a poisonous vapor thought to rise from rotting…

Astrology

Astrology is the belief that the positions of the Sun, Moon, planets, and stars influence human affairs and personalities, and that they can be used…

medicine

Do Vaccines Cause Autism?

The claim that vaccines cause autism is one of the most damaging medical myths of modern times. It has been investigated exhaustively and thoroughly…

medicine

Humorism: The Four Humors

Humorism, or humoral theory, was the belief that human health depends on the balance of four bodily fluids, called humors: blood, phlegm, yellow…

Theories explained

Well substantiated explanations of how things work

General Relativity

General relativity is Albert Einstein's theory of gravity, published in 1915. It reimagines gravity not as a force pulling objects together but as…

The Big Bang

The Big Bang is the prevailing cosmological theory of how the universe began. It holds that the universe started about 13.8 billion years ago in an…

Mendelian Inheritance

Mendelian inheritance is the set of principles describing how traits are passed from parents to offspring through discrete units we now call genes.…

Cell Theory

Cell theory is one of the foundational ideas of biology. It holds that all living things are made of cells, that the cell is the basic unit of life,…

Evolution by Natural Selection

Evolution by natural selection is the scientific theory that explains how the diversity of life arose and continues to change. It holds that…

mathematics

Theory· Mathematical

Chaos Theory

Chaos theory is the branch of mathematics that studies systems whose behaviour is exquisitely sensitive to their starting conditions. Such systems…

Acoustics: The Science of Sound

Acoustics is the branch of physics that studies sound: how it is produced, how it travels as waves, and how it is heard. It bridges science and art,…

The Greenhouse Effect

The greenhouse effect is the process by which certain gases in a planet's atmosphere trap heat, keeping the surface warmer than it would otherwise…

Endosymbiotic Theory

Endosymbiotic theory explains the origin of the complex cells that make up plants, animals, fungi, and other higher organisms. It proposes that key…

Electromagnetism

Electromagnetism is the branch of physics that describes the forces between electric charges and the deep connection between electricity and…

Special Relativity

Special relativity is the theory of space and time that Albert Einstein published in 1905. It revolutionized physics by showing that measurements of…

The Kinetic Theory of Gases

The kinetic theory of gases explains the behaviour of gases as the result of countless tiny particles, atoms and molecules, in constant, rapid,…

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Aug 5, 2026

Journalism

The gathering, verification and publication of information about current events. It is defined less by its subject than by its method, and the…

Quarantine

The separation and restriction of movement of people who may have been exposed to a contagious disease, to see whether they become ill. It is among…

The Water Cycle

The continuous movement of water between ocean, atmosphere, land and living things. The quantity is fixed; what changes is where it is and in what…

El Nino and La Nina

A recurring shift in ocean temperature and atmospheric pressure across the tropical Pacific that alters weather across much of the world. It is the…

Fermentation

The extraction of energy from sugars without oxygen. It is one of the oldest biological processes, humans have exploited it for at least nine…

Proteins

The molecules that carry out most of the work in a cell. They are built from a common set of twenty amino acids, and what each one does is determined…

Extremophiles

Organisms that live in conditions that would destroy most life. They are mostly microorganisms, they have substantially widened the definition of a…

Dendrochronology

Dating events and objects by counting and matching the annual growth rings of trees. It is the most precise dating method available for the last…

Fingerprint Identification

The use of friction ridge patterns on the fingers to identify individuals. It was the first widely adopted scientific identification method, it…

The Normal Distribution

The symmetric bell-shaped probability distribution that arises whenever many small independent influences add together. It is the most important…

Concrete

A composite of cement, water, sand and stone that begins as a liquid and hardens into artificial rock. It is the most used manufactured material on…

Cinema

The art and industry of moving pictures. It rests on a property of perception, was invented within a few years in several countries at once, and…

Skyscraper

A very tall multi-storey building, made possible in the late nineteenth century by two technologies arriving together: the steel frame and the safe…

Literacy

The ability to read and write. It is a comparatively recent condition for most of humanity, it was achieved unevenly and rapidly, and it changes the…

Vitamins

Organic compounds required in small amounts that the body cannot make for itself, or cannot make in sufficient quantity. Each was discovered through…

Biodiversity

The variety of life, measured at the level of genes, species and ecosystems. It is unevenly distributed, incompletely catalogued, and declining at a…

Chromosomes

The structures into which the DNA of a cell is packaged. They are how an organism's genetic material is organised, divided accurately between…

The Immune System

The set of cells, tissues and molecules that defends the body against infection. It operates in two connected layers: a fast general response, and a…

The Neuron

The cell type that carries and processes signals in the nervous system. Neurons are electrically excitable, connect to one another at junctions…