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Truth Classification

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How classification works

Capsule of the Day

FactSurgeryTreatment by physical intervention in the body. Surgery was limited for millennia not by knowledge of anatomy but by th…

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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

Factagriculture

Fishing

Catching aquatic animals for food. It is the last major food source still taken from the wild at scale, which is precisely why it is the one where the resource has been repeatedly…

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
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
Fact

Browse all

Showing 421 to 440 of 1,028

NewestMost votedA to Z
molecular biology
Theory

Protein Folding

A protein is manufactured as a linear chain of amino acids and only works once it has folded into a specific three-dimensional shape. How the chain…

byCapsule
biology

Platypus

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

by Capsule · Aug 7, 2026
Factbiology

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 precise stream where they…

by Capsule · Aug 7, 2026
Factgeography

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
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· 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 reviewsAug 7, 2026

Also new

More from the last few days

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
economics
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 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
media studies
Fact

The Telegraph

Communication by coded electrical signal over wires. It was the first technology to separate the speed of a message from the speed of travel, and…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
biology
Fact· Empirical

Seahorse

Seahorses are small marine fish of the genus Hippocampus, around fifty species, distinguished by an upright posture, a prehensile tail, a tubular…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
media studies
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 reviews
geography
Fact· Empirical

Winkler

Winkler is the fourth-largest city in Manitoba, in the Pembina Valley about twenty kilometres north of the United States border, with 13,745…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
medicine
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 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

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
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

Honey Bee

Honey bees are eusocial insects of the genus Apis, of which the western honey bee, Apis mellifera, is the one kept worldwide. They communicate the…

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
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

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
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
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
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
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
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 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

Open questions

Hypotheses under investigation and ideas still debated

See all
biology
Hypothesis

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…

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
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
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
engineering
Contested

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…

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
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
psychology
Contested

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…

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
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
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

Debunked

Claims the evidence overturned

See all
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
architecture
Debunked

The Golden Ratio in Art and Architecture

The golden ratio is a real and interesting number. The claim that it governs the Parthenon, the Great Pyramid, the Mona Lisa and the proportions of…

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
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
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
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
biology
Debunked

Lamarckism

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

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
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
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
geography
Debunked

The Bermuda Triangle

The Bermuda Triangle is a region of the Atlantic Ocean, roughly between Florida, Bermuda, and Puerto Rico, said to be the site of mysterious…

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

Theories explained

Well substantiated explanations of how things work

See all
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

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
biology
Theory

Mendelian Inheritance

Mendelian inheritance is the set of principles describing how traits are passed from parents to offspring through discrete units we now call genes.…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
physics
Theory

Thermodynamics

Thermodynamics is the branch of physics concerned with heat, energy, and work, and how they transform from one form to another. Its laws are among…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
biology
Theory

Endosymbiotic Theory

Endosymbiotic theory explains the origin of the complex cells that make up plants, animals, fungi, and other higher organisms. It proposes that key…

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
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
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
physics
Theory· Scientific

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
geology
Theory

Uniformitarianism

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

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
0 votes0 reviews
molecular biology
Theory

The Central Dogma of Molecular Biology

The central dogma states that sequence information flows from nucleic acid to protein, and never back out of a protein into nucleic acid. Francis…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
political science
Theory· Mathematical

The Median Voter Theorem

The median voter theorem states that under certain conditions, a majority-rule election between two candidates will be won by the position preferred…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
political science
Theory· Scientific

Duverger's Law

Duverger's law states that an electoral system in which the single candidate with the most votes wins each district tends to produce two dominant…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
political science
Contested

Democratic Peace Theory

Democratic peace theory holds that democracies do not, or almost never, go to war with one another. It is among the strongest empirical regularities…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
neuroscience
Theory

Neuroplasticity

Neuroplasticity is the brain's capacity to change its structure and function in response to experience, injury, and learning. It overturned a…

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
neuroscience
Contested

Mirror Neurons

Mirror neurons are cells that fire both when an animal performs an action and when it observes the same action performed by another. They were…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
ecology
Contested

Trophic Cascades

A trophic cascade occurs when a change at one level of a food web propagates down through the levels beneath it. The mechanism is real and…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
ecology
Theory· Scientific

Keystone Species

A keystone species is one whose effect on its ecosystem is disproportionately large relative to its abundance. The concept reorganised how ecologists…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
statistics
Contested

The Replication Crisis

The replication crisis is the finding that a substantial share of published research results cannot be reproduced when the studies are repeated. It…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
statistics
Proven· Mathematical Proof

Regression to the Mean

Regression to the mean is the tendency for an extreme measurement to be followed by one closer to average, for no reason other than that extremes…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
statistics
Proven· Mathematical Proof

Simpson's Paradox

Simpson's paradox is the phenomenon in which a trend appears in several groups of data and reverses when the groups are combined. It is not a…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
statistics
Contested

Statistical Significance

Statistical significance is a threshold used to decide whether a result is worth taking seriously. The conventional cutoff, a p-value below 0.05,…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
materials science
Theory· Scientific

Metamaterials

A metamaterial gets its properties from its structure rather than its chemistry. By arranging elements smaller than the wavelength of the wave…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
materials science
Proven· Replicated

Semiconductor Doping

Doping is the deliberate introduction of impurities into a semiconductor in order to control its electrical behaviour. Every transistor, and…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
materials science
Proven· Replicated

Shape-Memory Alloys

A shape-memory alloy is a metal that returns to a remembered shape when heated, having been deformed while cool. The effect looks like a trick and is…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
materials science
Contested

Room-Temperature Superconductors

A material that conducted electricity with no resistance at ordinary temperatures and pressures would be genuinely transformative, eliminating losses…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
materials science
Contested

Graphene

Graphene is a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal lattice, one atom thick. Its measured properties are extraordinary and not in…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
immunology
Proven· Replicated

Immunological Memory

Immunological memory is the reason surviving a disease usually protects against getting it again, and the reason vaccination works at all. It is…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
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