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Capsule of the Day

DebunkedThe PolygraphThe instrument popularly called a lie detector, which records breathing, blood pressure, pulse and skin conductance dur…

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The library

Capsules

1,028 capsules, each one classified by the strength of its evidence.

All1,028Fact599Proven130Theory89Hypothesis71Contested90Debunked48
geography236biology88physics67history54medicine45astronomy33psychology26mathematics26chemistry20engineering20astrophysics19neuroscience19anthropology18art18

Trending now

Most recent activity

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
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
Factmedia 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
Fact

Browse all

Showing 181 to 200 of 1,028

NewestMost votedA to Z
microbiology
Fact

Bacteria

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

byCapsule
biology

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 a journey no individual…

by Capsule · Aug 7, 2026
Factbiology

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 after humans. It is an apex…

by Capsule · Aug 7, 2026
Factagriculture

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 among the largest single…

by Capsule · Aug 5, 2026
Fact

Accounting

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

byCapsule0 votes0 reviewsAug 5, 2026
Fact

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 5, 2026

Also new

More from the last few days

nutrition
Fact

Salt

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

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
geography
Fact· Empirical

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
geography
Fact· Empirical

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
geography
Fact· Empirical

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
biology
Fact· Empirical

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,…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
biology
Fact· Empirical

Hummingbird

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

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
biology
Fact· Empirical

Platypus

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

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
education
Fact

Libraries

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

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews

On this day

A birth or event with an anniversary today

history
Fact· Empirical

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews

Settled science

Verified facts and proven results

See all
biology
Fact· Empirical

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
physics
Fact

Gravity

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

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
astronomy
Fact· Empirical

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 reviews
history
Fact

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
history
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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
science
Fact

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
geography
Fact· Empirical

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
geography
Fact· Empirical

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
astronomy
Fact· Empirical

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
agriculture
Fact

Traditional Yoruba Agricultural Practices in Southwestern Nigeria

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

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
geography
Fact· Empirical

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
biology
Fact· Empirical

Lion

The lion, Panthera leo, is the only truly social cat and the second largest after the tiger. It once ranged from southern Africa through the Middle…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews

Open questions

Hypotheses under investigation and ideas still debated

See all
astronomy
Hypothesis

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
earth science
Hypothesis

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
psychology
Hypothesis

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
science
Hypothesis

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
physics
Contested

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
astrophysics
Contested

How the Universe Will End

The ultimate fate of the universe is one of the deepest questions in science. Cosmologists have proposed several very different endings, and which…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
biology
Contested

Are Viruses Alive?

Whether viruses count as living organisms is a question biologists have debated for over a century, and there is still no settled answer. Viruses sit…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
astrophysics
Contested

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
philosophy
Hypothesis

The Simulation Hypothesis

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

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
physics
Contested

Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics

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

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
physics
Hypothesis

Wormholes

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

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
neuroscience
Contested

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews

Debunked

Claims the evidence overturned

See all
astronomy
Debunked

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
education
Debunked

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
physics
Debunked

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
history
Debunked

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
medicine
Debunked

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
biology
Debunked

Spontaneous Generation

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

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
history
Debunked

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
astronomy
Debunked

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
medicine
Debunked

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
astrophysics
Debunked

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
science
Debunked

Cold Fusion at Room Temperature

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

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
geology
Debunked

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews

Theories explained

Well substantiated explanations of how things work

See all
physics
Theory

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
biology
Theory· Scientific

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
mathematics
Theory

Topology

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

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
science
Theory

The Gut-Brain Axis: Microbiome Influence on Mental Health

The gut-brain axis describes the bi-directional signalling between gut microbiota and the central nervous system via the vagus nerve, immune system,…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
mathematics
Theory

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
mathematics
Theory

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,…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
physics
Theory

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
earth science
Theory

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
physics
Theory· Scientific

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
biology
Theory

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,…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
0 votes0 reviews
media studies
Fact

Journalism

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

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
epidemiology
Fact

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
earth science
Fact

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
climate science
Fact

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
biotechnology
Fact

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
biochemistry
Fact

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
astrobiology
Fact

Extremophiles

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

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
archaeology
Fact

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
criminology
Fact

Fingerprint Identification

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

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
statistics
Fact

The Normal Distribution

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

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
materials science
Fact

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
film
Fact

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
architecture
Fact

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
education
Fact

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
nutrition
Fact

Vitamins

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

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
ecology
Fact

Biodiversity

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

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
genetics
Fact

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
immunology
Fact

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
neuroscience
Fact

The Neuron

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

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
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