Capsules

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Peer Review

The evaluation of scholarly work by others in the same field before publication. It is the central quality mechanism of academic publishing, it is…

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art

Museums

Institutions that collect, preserve, study and display objects. What they display is a small fraction of what they hold, how they came to hold it is increasingly disputed, and the…

by Capsule · Aug 5, 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

Facteconomics

Accounting

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

by Capsule · Aug 5, 2026

Radio

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

byCapsule0 votes0 reviewsAug 7, 2026

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…

Also new

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…

geography

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…

Common Raven

The common raven, Corvus corax, is the largest songbird in the world and among the most widely distributed birds on Earth, occupying the whole…

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…

medicine

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,…

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,…

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…

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…

Settled science

Verified facts and proven results

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…

The Colosseum

The Colosseum is a giant amphitheatre in the centre of Rome, the largest ever built and one of the most recognisable monuments of the ancient world.…

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…

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…

geography

Canada

Canada is a country in North America, the second-largest in the world by total area, stretching from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific in…

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…

Fact· Historical

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…

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…

Gravity

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

Octopus

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

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,…

agriculture

Traditional Yoruba Agricultural Practices in Southwestern Nigeria

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

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Wormholes

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

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…

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…

Panspermia

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

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…

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…

Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics

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

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…

chemistry

Phlogiston Theory

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

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,…

science

Cold Fusion at Room Temperature

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

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Theories explained

Well substantiated explanations of how things work

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…

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…

geology

Uniformitarianism

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

Graph Theory

Graph theory is the branch of mathematics that studies networks of connected objects. A graph is simply a collection of points, called vertices,…

Electromagnetism

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

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…

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,…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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Aug 5, 2026

Monasticism

The practice of withdrawing from ordinary society to live under religious discipline, usually in community and usually under vows. It arose…

The Uncertainty Principle

The result that certain pairs of physical properties cannot both have precisely defined values at the same time. It is a statement about what quantum…

Elections

Procedures for selecting officeholders by vote. The rules by which votes are converted into outcomes are not neutral machinery: different systems…

Trilobites

An extinct class of marine arthropods that existed for roughly 270 million years, left an exceptionally rich fossil record, and are among the most…

Dietary Fibre

The parts of plant food that human digestive enzymes cannot break down. It supplies no energy directly and is one of the more consistently supported…

Neurotransmitters

The chemicals nerve cells use to signal to one another across synapses. They are the point at which the nervous system becomes chemical rather than…

Musical Instruments

Objects made or adapted to produce musical sound. They are among the oldest artefacts of human culture, and the ways they are classified reveal how…

Fungi

A kingdom of organisms distinct from plants and animals, which digest their food externally and absorb it. They decompose most of the world's dead…

Propaganda

Communication designed to shape opinion and behaviour in the interest of the party producing it, rather than to inform. It is defined by purpose and…

Glass

A solid that lacks the ordered internal arrangement of a crystal, formed by cooling a liquid fast enough that its atoms cannot arrange themselves. It…

Poetry

Language organised for its sound and rhythm as well as its meaning. It is older than prose literature, older than writing, and its formal constraints…

Translation

Rendering meaning from one language into another. It is never a mechanical substitution of words, because languages divide the world differently, and…

Constitutions

The fundamental rules establishing how a state is governed: which institutions exist, what powers they hold, how those powers are limited, and how…

Antibodies

Proteins produced by the immune system that bind specifically to a target and mark it for removal. Their variety is generated at random before any…

Mutation

A change in the sequence of an organism's DNA. Mutations are the ultimate source of all genetic variation, most have no effect, some cause disease,…

Documentary Film

Film presenting factual material about real events and people. The form is as old as cinema itself, and the question of how far a documentary…

Contact Tracing

Identifying the people an infected person may have exposed, so they can be tested, treated or asked to isolate before they infect others. It is a…

Numeracy

The ability to understand and work with numbers in practical situations. It is distinct from mathematical education, it is measured internationally,…

Ecological Succession

The sequence of changes in the species occupying a place over time after disturbance or after new ground appears. It is one of the oldest…