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Truth Classification

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How classification works

Capsule of the Day

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

New in the Library

  • FactTardigrade
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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

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 nothing. They spend the…

by Capsule · Aug 7, 2026
Factbiology

Ant

Ants are eusocial insects of the family Formicidae, with over 14,000 described species and an estimated global population around twenty quadrillion individuals. They occur on…

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
Fact

Browse all

Showing 361 to 380 of 1,028

NewestMost votedA to Z
biology
Proven

Meiosis

The cell division that halves the chromosome number and shuffles the genome at the same time. It is the reason sexual reproduction produces…

byCapsule
economics

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
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
Factbiology

Tardigrade

Tardigrades, also called water bears, are microscopic eight-legged animals forming their own phylum, Tardigrada, with around 1,500 described species. They are famous for surviving…

by Capsule · Aug 7, 2026
Fact· Empirical

Ant

Ants are eusocial insects of the family Formicidae, with over 14,000 described species and an estimated global population around twenty quadrillion…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviewsAug 7, 2026
Fact

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviewsAug 5, 2026

Also new

More from the last few days

biology
Fact· Empirical

Komodo Dragon

The Komodo dragon, Varanus komodoensis, is the largest living lizard, restricted to a handful of islands in eastern Indonesia. It grows to around…

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

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
geography
Fact· Empirical

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
geography
Fact· Empirical

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 reviews
agriculture
Fact

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…

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

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
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
history
Fact· Empirical

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,…

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
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

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
biology
Proven· Replicated

Photosynthesis

Photosynthesis is the process by which plants, algae, and certain bacteria capture the energy of sunlight and use it to turn carbon dioxide and water…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
astronomy
Fact· Empirical

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…

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
astronomy
Fact· Empirical

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…

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
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
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

Open questions

Hypotheses under investigation and ideas still debated

See all
astronomy
Contested

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
philosophy
Contested

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…

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
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
astronomy
Contested

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…

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
mathematics
Hypothesis

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…

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
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
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
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 Killed the Dinosaurs

Around sixty six million years ago, the dinosaurs and many other forms of life suddenly vanished in one of the great mass extinctions in Earth's…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews

Debunked

Claims the evidence overturned

See all
nutrition
Debunked

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
literature
Debunked

The Shakespeare Authorship Question

The claim that the works attributed to William Shakespeare were written by someone else. It has attracted eminent supporters for a hundred and…

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
criminology
Debunked

Criminal Profiling

Offender profiling infers a perpetrator's characteristics from crime scene evidence. The specific claim that it reliably narrows a suspect pool, and…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
physics
Debunked

The Caloric Theory

The caloric theory was an explanation of heat, widely accepted into the early nineteenth century, which held that heat is an invisible, weightless…

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
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
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
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
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
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
biology
Debunked

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews

Theories explained

Well substantiated explanations of how things work

See all
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
physics
Theory

Acoustics: The Science of Sound

Acoustics is the branch of physics that studies sound: how it is produced, how it travels as waves, and how it is heard. It bridges science and art,…

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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
0 votes0 reviews
medicine
Proven

Magnetic Resonance Imaging

A way of photographing the inside of a living body in any plane, at high resolution, without ionising radiation, by making hydrogen nuclei resonate…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
engineering
Proven

The Transistor

A device that lets a small electrical signal control a large one, with no moving parts, made from a crystal. It replaced the vacuum tube, made…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
neuroscience
Proven

The McGurk Effect

Watch a face saying one syllable while hearing another, and you perceive a third that was never present in either. Speech perception turns out to be…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
genetics
Proven

The Hardy-Weinberg Principle

In a large population with random mating and nothing else happening, gene frequencies do not change from one generation to the next. It sounds like a…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
medicine
Proven

The Randomised Controlled Trial

Assign people to treatments by chance, and the groups differ only by chance. It is a simple idea, it is the most reliable method medicine has for…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
geology
Proven

Geomagnetic Reversal

The Earth's magnetic field has flipped hundreds of times, north becoming south and back. The record of those reversals is frozen into the ocean…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
psychology
Proven

The Stroop Effect

Naming the colour a word is printed in becomes markedly harder when the word itself names a different colour. The delay is a few hundred…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
physics
Proven

The Double-Slit Experiment

Send particles one at a time through two narrow openings and they build up a pattern that only waves can produce. Watch which opening each one goes…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
medicine
Hypothesis

The Amyloid Hypothesis

The proposal that Alzheimer's disease is caused by the accumulation of amyloid beta protein in the brain. It has directed the field for over thirty…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
geology
Hypothesis

The Silurian Hypothesis

If an industrial civilisation had existed on Earth millions of years before our own, would we be able to tell? Gavin Schmidt and Adam Frank asked the…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
geology
Hypothesis

The Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis

The proposal that a comet or asteroid struck or exploded over North America about 12,800 years ago, triggering an abrupt return to glacial…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
genetics
Hypothesis

The Thrifty Gene Hypothesis

The proposal that genes favouring efficient fat storage were advantageous during famine and became harmful once food became abundant, explaining the…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
anthropology
Hypothesis

The Expensive Tissue Hypothesis

The proposal that the human brain could only grow large because the gut shrank, since both are metabolically costly and the body's energy budget is…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
anthropology
Hypothesis

The Social Brain Hypothesis

The proposal that primate brains grew large to manage social relationships rather than to solve ecological problems, and that the size of a species'…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
anthropology
Hypothesis

The Grandmother Hypothesis

Human females stop reproducing decades before they die, which almost no other species does. The grandmother hypothesis proposes that this is an…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
medicine
Proven

The Circulation of the Blood

William Harvey demonstrated in 1628 that blood circulates in a closed loop driven by the heart. He proved it by measurement, against a doctrine that…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
medicine
Proven

General Anaesthesia

Surgery without pain, without memory, and without movement, produced reliably millions of times a year. That it works is beyond question. How it…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
biology
Proven

Sexual Selection

Darwin's second theory, proposed to explain traits that natural selection could not: peacock tails, antlers, birdsong, and every ornament that costs…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
biology
Proven

Convergent Evolution

Unrelated lineages repeatedly arrive at the same solution. Eyes, wings, flight, venom and photosynthesis have each evolved independently many times,…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
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