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Kenya

Kenya is a country in East Africa, sitting astride the equator on the Indian Ocean coast. Its landscapes are dramatically varied, from tropical…

byCapsule

geography

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 2021 census. Its name records…

by Capsule · Aug 7, 2026

Factmedicine

Surgery

Treatment by physical intervention in the body. Surgery was limited for millennia not by knowledge of anatomy but by three specific obstacles, and the century in which those were…

by Capsule · Aug 5, 2026

Facteducation

Libraries

Organised collections of recorded knowledge, held for use. Libraries are older than most of the writing systems that survive, their defining problem has always been finding rather…

by Capsule · Aug 5, 2026

byCapsule0 votes0 reviewsAug 7, 2026

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…

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…

Also new

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…

Seahorse

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

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…

Orca

The orca, Orcinus orca, also called the killer whale, is the largest member of the dolphin family and the most widely distributed mammal on Earth…

economics

Accounting

The systematic recording and reporting of financial activity. Double-entry bookkeeping is among the more consequential inventions in the history of…

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…

Hummingbird

Hummingbirds, the family Trochilidae, are small nectar-feeding birds of the Americas that hover in sustained flight and run the highest mass-specific…

agriculture

Livestock

Domesticated animals kept for food, fibre, labour and other products. Livestock made agriculture viable on land that grows no crops, and they are now…

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

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…

French Revolution

The French Revolution (1789–1799) was a period of radical political and social upheaval in France that ended the Bourbon monarchy, abolished feudal…

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…

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…

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…

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…

geography

Amazon Rainforest

The Amazon Rainforest is the largest tropical rainforest on Earth, a vast sea of green covering some 5.5 million square kilometres across nine South…

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…

Domestic Cat

The domestic cat, Felis catus, is the most numerous small carnivore on Earth, with something over six hundred million individuals. It is also barely…

Penguin

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

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…

Open questions

Hypotheses under investigation and ideas still debated

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…

philosophy

Free Will

Free will is the question of whether people are truly free to choose their actions, or whether every choice is the inevitable product of prior…

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…

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…

Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics

Quantum mechanics is the most successful physical theory ever devised, predicting the behavior of atoms, light, and subatomic particles with…

Are Animals Conscious?

Whether animals have conscious experiences, an inner life of feelings and awareness, is a deep and genuinely contested question. That many animals…

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…

psychology

The Origin of Language

How human language first arose is one of the hardest questions in science. That we alone among animals possess full language is clear; when, how, and…

science

Quantum Entanglement as a Substrate for Consciousness

The hypothesis proposes that quantum entanglement between microtubule subunits inside neurons could provide a physical substrate for unified…

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 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…

earth science

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…

Debunked

Claims the evidence overturned

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…

nutrition

Breakfast as the Most Important Meal

The claim that eating breakfast is necessary for health and weight control, and that skipping it causes weight gain. The phrase was popularised by…

Lamarckism

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

geology

The Hollow Earth

The hollow Earth was the idea that our planet is not solid but hollow, perhaps containing a habitable inner world, or even inner suns and…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

Spontaneous Generation

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

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…

The Geocentric Model

The geocentric model was the ancient belief that the Earth sits motionless at the center of the universe, with the Sun, Moon, planets, and stars all…

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…

Theories explained

Well substantiated explanations of how things work

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…

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…

Dark Matter: The Leading Theoretical Framework for Missing Mass in the Universe

Dark matter is the leading theoretical framework proposed to explain gravitational effects observed in galaxies and galaxy clusters that cannot be…

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…

Theory· Mathematical

Game Theory

Game theory is the mathematical study of strategic decision making, where the outcome for each participant depends not only on their own choice but…

earth science

Theory· Scientific

Plate Tectonics

Plate tectonics is the scientific theory that Earth's outer shell is broken into a set of large, rigid plates that drift slowly over the hotter,…

Topology

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

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…

geology

Uniformitarianism

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

computer science

Theory· Mathematical

Information Theory

Information theory is the mathematical study of how information is measured, stored, and communicated. It defines what information actually is in…

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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Jun 17, 2026

Italy

Italy is a country in Southern Europe, instantly recognisable for its long boot-shaped peninsula reaching into the Mediterranean Sea, along with the…

Mexico

Mexico is a large country in the southern part of North America, bordered by the United States to the north and by Guatemala and Belize to the south.…

India

India is a vast country in South Asia, the seventh largest by area and the most populous in the world. It stretches from the Himalayas in the north…

Brazil

Brazil is the largest country in South America and the fifth largest in the world by area, covering almost half the continent. It holds the greater…

France

France is a country in Western Europe, the largest by area in the European Union, reaching from the English Channel in the north to the Mediterranean…

Japan

Japan is an island nation in East Asia, an archipelago of nearly 7,000 islands strung along the Pacific edge of the continent. Four large islands…

Is Time Travel Possible?

Time travel, journeying into the past or the future, is a staple of science fiction, but is it actually possible? The surprising answer from physics…

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…

Social Media

Social media refers to the online platforms and apps that let people create and share content and connect with one another. In barely two decades, it…

Electric Vehicles

Electric vehicles, or EVs, are cars and other vehicles powered by electric motors and batteries instead of by burning petrol or diesel. Once a niche…

The Manhattan Project

The Manhattan Project was a secret American research effort during World War II that produced the first atomic bombs. A vast scientific and…

The Black Death

The Black Death was a devastating plague that swept through Europe, Asia, and North Africa in the mid 1300s, killing tens of millions of people. One…

World War II

World War II (1939 to 1945) was the deadliest and most widespread conflict in human history, involving most of the world's nations and claiming an…

The Titanic

The Titanic was a British ocean liner that sank in 1912 on its very first voyage after striking an iceberg, killing about 1,500 people. The disaster…

Serena Williams

Serena Williams (born 1981) is an American tennis player widely regarded as one of the greatest athletes of all time. With a record breaking career…

Charlie Chaplin

Charlie Chaplin (1889 to 1977) was a British actor, filmmaker, and comedian who became one of the most important and beloved figures in the history…

Neil Armstrong

Neil Armstrong (1930 to 2012) was an American astronaut and the first human being to set foot on the Moon. His step onto the lunar surface in 1969…

Winston Churchill

Winston Churchill (1874 to 1965) was a British statesman who served as Prime Minister during the Second World War and led the United Kingdom through…

Jane Austen

Jane Austen (1775 to 1817) was an English novelist whose sharp, witty stories of love, marriage, and society have made her one of the most beloved…