Capsules

Browse all

Showing 961 to 980 of 1,028

Newest Most voted A to Z

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…

byCapsule

geography

Steinbach

Steinbach is the third-largest city in Manitoba, about sixty kilometres southeast of Winnipeg, with 17,806 residents at the 2021 census. Founded by Mennonite settlers from the…

by Capsule · Aug 7, 2026

Factepidemiology

Sanitation

The safe management of human waste. It has saved more lives than any medical treatment, it is the least discussed of the major public health measures, and roughly a fifth of the…

by Capsule · Aug 5, 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

byCapsule0 votes0 reviewsAug 7, 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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviewsAug 7, 2026

Selkirk

Selkirk is a city on the Red River about twenty-two kilometres northeast of Winnipeg, with 10,504 residents at the 2021 census. It came close to…

Also new

Nursing

The care of the sick, injured and dependent. Nursing is the largest health profession by a wide margin, its outcomes are measurable and substantial,…

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…

media studies

Radio

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

Hummingbird

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

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…

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…

nutrition

Salt

Sodium chloride. It is physiologically essential, it was the only reliable food preservative for most of history, and its scarcity relative to demand…

geography

Flin Flon

Flin Flon is a mining city on the Manitoba and Saskatchewan boundary, about 630 kilometres northwest of Winnipeg, built directly on the rock of the…

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…

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…

DNA (Deoxyribonucleic Acid)

Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) is the molecule that carries the genetic instructions used in the growth, development, functioning, and reproduction of…

science

CRISPR-Cas9 Gene Editing: Mechanism and Applications

CRISPR-Cas9 is a programmable nuclease that uses a guide RNA to direct the Cas9 enzyme to a specific genomic sequence, where it introduces a precise…

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…

Octopus

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

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 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…

geography

Mount Everest

Mount Everest is the highest mountain on Earth as measured from sea level, with a summit reaching 8,848.86 metres (29,031.7 feet) above sea level, a…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

neuroscience

The Hard Problem of Consciousness

The hard problem of consciousness is the question of why and how physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experience, the felt quality…

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…

earth science

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…

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…

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 Rare Earth Hypothesis

The Rare Earth hypothesis proposes that complex, multicellular life, of the kind found on Earth, is extremely rare in the universe, because it…

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…

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…

Wormholes

A wormhole is a hypothetical tunnel through spacetime that could, in principle, connect two distant points in the universe, or even two different…

Debunked

Claims the evidence overturned

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…

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…

neuroscience

The Left-Brain, Right-Brain Myth

The idea that people are left-brained and therefore logical, or right-brained and therefore creative, is one of the most widely believed claims about…

Lamarckism

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

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…

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…

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…

astrophysics

The Steady State Theory

The steady state theory was a model of the universe, popular in the mid twentieth century, which held that the universe has always looked roughly the…

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…

science

Cold Fusion at Room Temperature

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

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…

Flat Earth

The idea that the Earth is flat is a debunked belief that the planet is a disc or a plane rather than a sphere. It has been contradicted by…

Theories explained

Well substantiated explanations of how things work

medicine

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…

Quantum Mechanics

Quantum mechanics is the branch of physics that describes the behaviour of matter and energy at the smallest scales, those of atoms and subatomic…

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…

mathematics

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…

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…

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…

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…

geology

Uniformitarianism

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

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 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,…

earth science

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,…

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…

0 votes0 reviews

Mar 20, 2026

byCapsule0 votes0 reviewsMar 19, 2026

Black Hole

A black hole is a region of space where gravity is so intense that nothing, not even light, can escape once it passes a certain boundary. They are…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviewsMar 18, 2026

Dolphin

Dolphins are toothed whales of the family Delphinidae and several river families, around forty species. They echolocate, they call each other by name…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviewsMar 15, 2026

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviewsMar 14, 2026

The Printing Press

The printing press is a machine for transferring ink onto paper to reproduce text and images quickly and in large numbers. Its development in Europe…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviewsMar 14, 2026

DNA (Deoxyribonucleic Acid)

Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) is the molecule that carries the genetic instructions used in the growth, development, functioning, and reproduction of…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviewsMar 8, 2026

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviewsMar 8, 2026

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviewsMar 6, 2026

Vaccines

A vaccine is a preparation that trains the immune system to recognize and fight a specific disease before the body is ever exposed to the real…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviewsMar 1, 2026

Tiger

The tiger, Panthera tigris, is the largest living cat, a solitary ambush predator of Asian forest, grassland and mangrove. It occupies something like…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviewsMar 1, 2026

The Eiffel Tower

The Eiffel Tower is a wrought iron lattice tower in Paris, France, and one of the most recognized structures in the world. Standing about 330 metres…

Proven· Clinical

Pasteurization

Pasteurization is the process of heating a food or drink to a specific temperature for a set length of time in order to kill harmful microorganisms…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviewsMar 1, 2026

byCapsule0 votes0 reviewsFeb 28, 2026

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…

Giant Panda

The giant panda, Ailuropoda melanoleuca, is a bear that eats bamboo. That sentence contains the whole problem: it has the digestive system of a…

Nelson Mandela

Nelson Mandela was a South African anti-apartheid revolutionary and statesman who served as the country's first democratically elected president.…

Proven· Mathematical Proof

The Four Color Theorem

The four color theorem states that any map drawn on a flat surface can be colored using only four colors in such a way that no two regions sharing a…

Spontaneous Generation

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

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…

Nile Crocodile

The Nile crocodile, Crocodylus niloticus, is Africa's largest freshwater predator and the second largest crocodilian after the saltwater crocodile.…

Wormholes

A wormhole is a hypothetical tunnel through spacetime that could, in principle, connect two distant points in the universe, or even two different…