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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

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
Facteconomics

Banking

Institutions that take deposits and make loans. The central fact about banking is that it creates money rather than merely storing it, and almost every difficulty the industry…

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
Fact

Browse all

Showing 301 to 320 of 1,028

NewestMost votedA to Z
biology
Hypothesis

The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis

The proposal that evolutionary theory needs restructuring to give causal roles to development, inheritance beyond genes, and organisms shaping their…

byCapsule
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 Canadian Shield. It is one of…

by Capsule · Aug 7, 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
Factbiology

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…

by Capsule · Aug 7, 2026
Fact

Banking

Institutions that take deposits and make loans. The central fact about banking is that it creates money rather than merely storing it, and almost…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviewsAug 5, 2026
Fact

Surgery

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

byCapsule0 votes0 reviewsAug 5, 2026

Also new

More from the last few days

biology
Fact· Empirical

Albatross

Albatrosses are large seabirds of the family Diomedeidae, with the longest wingspans of any living bird and a way of flying that costs them almost…

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

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
biology
Fact· Empirical

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 reviews
economics
Fact

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
biology
Fact· Empirical

Axolotl

The axolotl, Ambystoma mexicanum, is a salamander that never leaves the larval form. It reaches sexual maturity while keeping its gills and its…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
geography
Fact· Empirical

Winnipeg

Winnipeg is the capital and largest city of the Canadian province of Manitoba, built where the Red and Assiniboine rivers meet near the longitudinal…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
economics
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 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
geography
Fact· Empirical

The Sahara

The Sahara is the largest hot desert on Earth, a sweep of sand, gravel, and bare rock stretching across northern Africa from the Atlantic Ocean to…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
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
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
biology
Fact· Empirical

Penguin

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

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
biology
Fact· Empirical

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
biology
Fact· Empirical

Octopus

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

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
agriculture
Fact

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,…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
chemistry
Fact

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
history
Fact· Empirical

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.…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
geography
Fact· Empirical

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
biology
Fact· Empirical

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 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

Open questions

Hypotheses under investigation and ideas still debated

See all
astronomy
Hypothesis

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
psychology
Contested

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
history
Contested

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…

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
earth science
Contested

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
astronomy
Hypothesis

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 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
Hypothesis

Panspermia

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

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
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
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
astronomy
Contested

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews

Debunked

Claims the evidence overturned

See all
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
history
Debunked

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,…

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
chemistry
Debunked

Phlogiston Theory

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

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
neuroscience
Debunked

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
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
music
Debunked

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…

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

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
neuroscience
Debunked

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
medicine
Debunked

Miasma Theory

Miasma theory was the belief that diseases such as cholera and the plague were caused by "bad air," a poisonous vapor thought to rise from rotting…

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

Theories explained

Well substantiated explanations of how things work

See all
chemistry
Theory

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
physics
Theory

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
astronomy
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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
physics
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.…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
physics
Theory

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,…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
astrophysics
Theory

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
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…

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

Electromagnetism

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

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
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
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
mathematics
Theory

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
0 votes0 reviews
biology
Hypothesis

The Red Queen Hypothesis

The proposal that organisms must keep evolving simply to maintain their position, because everything they interact with is evolving too. It takes its…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
biology
Hypothesis

Antagonistic Pleiotropy

The proposal that ageing is caused by genes which help early in life and harm later, and which selection favours anyway because early effects matter…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
biology
Hypothesis

The Disposable Soma Theory

The proposal that organisms age because it is not worth the energy to maintain a body indefinitely when something will kill it anyway. It explains…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
biology
Hypothesis

The Free Radical Theory of Ageing

The proposal that ageing is cumulative damage from reactive oxygen species produced by normal metabolism. It dominated ageing research for half a…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
astronomy
Hypothesis

The Late Heavy Bombardment

The proposal that the inner solar system was struck by a sudden surge of impacts around 3.9 billion years ago, hundreds of millions of years after…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
immunology
Proven

Clonal Selection

The immune system generates enormous numbers of cells with randomly assembled receptors, and whichever happen to fit an invader are multiplied. It is…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
engineering
Proven

Satellite Navigation

Knowing where you are anywhere on Earth to within a few metres, by timing radio signals from satellites. It works because atomic clocks are…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
mathematics
Proven

The Four Colour Theorem

Four colours suffice to colour any map so that no two regions sharing a border have the same colour. It was conjectured in 1852, resisted proof for…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
economics
Proven

The Nash Equilibrium

A situation in which no participant can do better by changing strategy alone. It is the central solution concept in game theory, it exists in every…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
physics
Proven

X-rays

A form of light too energetic to see, discovered by accident in 1895, which passes through flesh and is stopped by bone. Within months it was in…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
biology
Proven

Nitrogen Fixation

Air is nearly eighty percent nitrogen and almost nothing can use it. Breaking the bond that holds the molecule together is what makes proteins and…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
biology
Proven

Apoptosis

Cells kill themselves on instruction, following a controlled programme that dismantles them tidily. It builds bodies by removing what is not needed,…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
neuroscience
Proven

Long-Term Potentiation

A brief burst of activity at a synapse can strengthen it for hours, days or longer. It is the best-supported cellular mechanism for learning, it was…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
neuroscience
Proven

Colour Vision

Colour is not a property of light. It is what the visual system computes from the responses of three receptor types, and the computation is what…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
medicine
Hypothesis

The Social Defeat Hypothesis of Psychosis

The proposal that chronic experience of being excluded or subordinated raises the risk of psychosis, by sensitising the brain's dopamine system. It…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
immunology
Hypothesis

The Old Friends Hypothesis

The proposal that the immune system requires exposure to organisms it co-evolved with in order to develop proper regulation, and that losing those…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
biology
Hypothesis

The Drunken Monkey Hypothesis

The proposal that the human attraction to alcohol descends from a primate ancestor's taste for fermenting fruit, in which ethanol signalled ripeness…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
anthropology
Hypothesis

The Savanna Hypothesis

The proposal that human ancestors left the forest for open grassland, and that walking upright, losing body hair and much else followed from that…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
neuroscience
Hypothesis

Integrated Information Theory

Giulio Tononi's proposal that consciousness is integrated information, quantifiable as a number called phi, and present wherever that number is above…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
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