Capsules

Ant

Ants are eusocial insects of the family Formicidae, with over 14,000 described species and an estimated global population around twenty quadrillion individuals. They occur on…

Wolf

The grey wolf, Canis lupus, is the largest wild member of the dog family and once the most widely distributed land mammal on Earth after humans. It is also the ancestor of the…

Salmon

Salmon are anadromous fish of the family Salmonidae: born in fresh water, grown at sea, and returning to fresh water to spawn, in most cases to the precise stream where they…

Factagriculture

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Meiosis

The cell division that halves the chromosome number and shuffles the genome at the same time. It is the reason sexual reproduction produces…

byCapsule

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 the resource has been repeatedly…

by Capsule · Aug 5, 2026

Horse

The horse, Equus ferus caballus, is a large grazing mammal domesticated on the Eurasian steppe and, for roughly four thousand years, the fastest way a human being could travel…

Platypus

The platypus, Ornithorhynchus anatinus, is a semiaquatic egg-laying mammal of eastern Australia. It lays eggs, produces milk without nipples, detects prey by electric field, and…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviewsAug 7, 2026

Wolf

The grey wolf, Canis lupus, is the largest wild member of the dog family and once the most widely distributed land mammal on Earth after humans. It…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviewsAug 7, 2026

Salmon

Salmon are anadromous fish of the family Salmonidae: born in fresh water, grown at sea, and returning to fresh water to spawn, in most cases to the…

Also new

The Telegraph

Communication by coded electrical signal over wires. It was the first technology to separate the speed of a message from the speed of travel, and…

Portage la Prairie

Portage la Prairie is a city in central Manitoba on the Assiniboine River, about eighty kilometres west of Winnipeg, with 13,270 residents at the…

media studies

Radio

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

Tardigrade

Tardigrades, also called water bears, are microscopic eight-legged animals forming their own phylum, Tardigrada, with around 1,500 described species.…

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…

Dauphin

Dauphin is a city in the Parkland region of western Manitoba, between Riding Mountain National Park and Lake Dauphin, with 8,368 residents at the…

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…

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…

On this day

A birth or event with an anniversary today

Statue of Liberty

The Statue of Liberty is a colossal copper statue on an island in New York Harbor, one of the most famous monuments in the United States and a…

Settled science

Verified facts and proven results

Octopus

Octopuses are eight-armed cephalopod molluscs, around three hundred species, found in every ocean. They have three hearts, blue blood, no skeleton,…

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…

Proven· Replicated

Photosynthesis

Photosynthesis is the process by which plants, algae, and certain bacteria capture the energy of sunlight and use it to turn carbon dioxide and water…

Gravity

Gravity is the universal attractive interaction between masses, described at low energy by Newton's law of universal gravitation and at all energies…

agriculture

Traditional Yoruba Agricultural Practices in Southwestern Nigeria

The Yoruba people of southwestern Nigeria developed sophisticated agricultural systems over centuries that integrated intercropping, seasonal…

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…

geology

Volcano

A volcano is an opening in a planet's crust through which molten rock, gas, and ash erupt from the hot interior to the surface. On Earth they are…

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…

engineering

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…

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…

chemistry

Water (H₂O)

Water is a chemical compound with the formula H₂O, consisting of two hydrogen atoms covalently bonded to one oxygen atom. Its bent molecular geometry…

Penguin

Penguins are flightless seabirds of the southern hemisphere, around eighteen species, which gave up flight in the air for flight underwater. They are…

Open questions

Hypotheses under investigation and ideas still debated

philosophy

The Simulation Hypothesis

The simulation hypothesis is the proposal that the reality we experience might actually be an artificial simulation, such as an immensely…

Goldbach's Conjecture

Goldbach's conjecture is one of the oldest and simplest sounding unsolved problems in mathematics. It states that every even whole number greater…

Panspermia

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

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…

Abiogenesis: The Origin of Life

Abiogenesis is the natural process by which life is thought to have arisen from non living matter, such as simple chemical compounds. How life first…

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…

The Anthropic Principle

The anthropic principle concerns the striking observation that the universe appears remarkably fine tuned for the existence of life. Many of the…

The Multiverse

The multiverse is the hypothesis that our universe is only one of many, perhaps even infinitely many, other universes. It is taken seriously by many…

Is Pluto a Planet?

Whether Pluto should be called a planet is a question that has divided astronomers and captured the public imagination. Discovered in 1930 and…

engineering

Renewable Energy and Electrical Grid Stability

Wind and solar generation are non-dispatchable and produce zero rotational inertia, raising legitimate concerns about frequency regulation and…

The Fermi Paradox

The Fermi paradox is the puzzling contrast between the high apparent likelihood that alien civilizations exist somewhere in our vast galaxy and 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…

Debunked

Claims the evidence overturned

Alchemy

Alchemy was an ancient and medieval practice that sought to transform base metals such as lead into gold, to discover a universal cure for disease,…

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…

Spontaneous Generation

Spontaneous generation was the long held belief that living organisms could arise directly from non living matter. People thought maggots formed from…

criminology

Criminal Profiling

Offender profiling infers a perpetrator's characteristics from crime scene evidence. The specific claim that it reliably narrows a suspect pool, and…

medicine

Bloodletting

Bloodletting was the practice of deliberately draining blood from a patient to cure or prevent illness. For more than two thousand years it was one…

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…

Lamarckism

Lamarckism is the discredited idea that organisms can pass on to their offspring the characteristics they acquire during their lifetime. Its classic…

chemistry

Phlogiston Theory

Phlogiston theory was an early explanation of combustion, widely accepted in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It held that all flammable…

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…

literature

The Shakespeare Authorship Question

The claim that the works attributed to William Shakespeare were written by someone else. It has attracted eminent supporters for a hundred and…

The Luminiferous Aether

The luminiferous aether was a hypothetical substance once believed to fill all of space and to serve as the medium through which light waves…

geology

The Expanding Earth

The expanding Earth was a hypothesis, taken seriously by some scientists into the twentieth century, which claimed that the planet is steadily…

Theories explained

Well substantiated explanations of how things work

astrophysics

Stellar Evolution

Stellar evolution is the scientific account of how stars are born, live, and die over millions or billions of years. Though no one can watch a single…

geology

Uniformitarianism

Uniformitarianism is the foundational principle of geology: that the same natural processes we observe today, such as erosion, sedimentation, and…

The Theory of Computation

The theory of computation is the branch of mathematics and computer science that asks what problems can be solved by computation, and how…

Optics

Optics is the branch of physics that studies light: how it travels, how it interacts with matter, and how it can be controlled with lenses and…

medicine

Theory· Scientific

Germ Theory of Disease

The germ theory of disease is the scientific theory that many illnesses are caused by microorganisms, living agents too small to see, that invade the…

Theory· Emerging

String Theory

String theory is a theoretical framework that attempts to unify all the forces and particles of nature, including gravity, into a single description.…

Set Theory

Set theory is the branch of mathematics that studies collections of objects, called sets. Though it begins with an idea as simple as grouping things…

Electromagnetism

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

chemistry

Atomic Theory

Atomic theory is the idea that all matter is made up of tiny particles called atoms. It is one of the most important and successful ideas in all of…

Theory· Scientific

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…

Topology

Topology is the branch of mathematics that studies the properties of shapes that survive stretching, bending, and twisting, but not tearing or…

Aerodynamics: How Flight Works

Aerodynamics is the study of how air flows around objects and the forces this creates. It is the science that explains how aircraft fly, how cars and…

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Aug 3, 2026

Magnetic Resonance Imaging

A way of photographing the inside of a living body in any plane, at high resolution, without ionising radiation, by making hydrogen nuclei resonate…

The Transistor

A device that lets a small electrical signal control a large one, with no moving parts, made from a crystal. It replaced the vacuum tube, made…

The McGurk Effect

Watch a face saying one syllable while hearing another, and you perceive a third that was never present in either. Speech perception turns out to be…

The Hardy-Weinberg Principle

In a large population with random mating and nothing else happening, gene frequencies do not change from one generation to the next. It sounds like a…

The Randomised Controlled Trial

Assign people to treatments by chance, and the groups differ only by chance. It is a simple idea, it is the most reliable method medicine has for…

Geomagnetic Reversal

The Earth's magnetic field has flipped hundreds of times, north becoming south and back. The record of those reversals is frozen into the ocean…

The Stroop Effect

Naming the colour a word is printed in becomes markedly harder when the word itself names a different colour. The delay is a few hundred…

The Double-Slit Experiment

Send particles one at a time through two narrow openings and they build up a pattern that only waves can produce. Watch which opening each one goes…

The Amyloid Hypothesis

The proposal that Alzheimer's disease is caused by the accumulation of amyloid beta protein in the brain. It has directed the field for over thirty…

The Silurian Hypothesis

If an industrial civilisation had existed on Earth millions of years before our own, would we be able to tell? Gavin Schmidt and Adam Frank asked the…

The Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis

The proposal that a comet or asteroid struck or exploded over North America about 12,800 years ago, triggering an abrupt return to glacial…

The Thrifty Gene Hypothesis

The proposal that genes favouring efficient fat storage were advantageous during famine and became harmful once food became abundant, explaining the…

The Expensive Tissue Hypothesis

The proposal that the human brain could only grow large because the gut shrank, since both are metabolically costly and the body's energy budget is…

The Social Brain Hypothesis

The proposal that primate brains grew large to manage social relationships rather than to solve ecological problems, and that the size of a species'…

The Grandmother Hypothesis

Human females stop reproducing decades before they die, which almost no other species does. The grandmother hypothesis proposes that this is an…

The Circulation of the Blood

William Harvey demonstrated in 1628 that blood circulates in a closed loop driven by the heart. He proved it by measurement, against a doctrine that…

General Anaesthesia

Surgery without pain, without memory, and without movement, produced reliably millions of times a year. That it works is beyond question. How it…

Sexual Selection

Darwin's second theory, proposed to explain traits that natural selection could not: peacock tails, antlers, birdsong, and every ornament that costs…

Convergent Evolution

Unrelated lineages repeatedly arrive at the same solution. Eyes, wings, flight, venom and photosynthesis have each evolved independently many times,…