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Truth Classification

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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

Factbiology

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 is also the ancestor of the…

by Capsule · Aug 7, 2026
Factmedia studies

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 that separation changed news,…

by Capsule · Aug 5, 2026
Factbiology

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
Fact

Browse all

Showing 41 to 60 of 1,028

NewestMost votedA to Z
engineering
Fact

Refrigeration

Removing heat from a space to keep it below the surrounding temperature. It is the technology that changed what people eat more than any other, and…

byCapsule
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 among the largest single…

by Capsule · Aug 5, 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

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 years. They breathe air,…

by Capsule · Aug 7, 2026
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 reviewsAug 5, 2026
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 reviewsAug 7, 2026

Also new

More from the last few days

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
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
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
biology
Fact· Empirical

Chimpanzee

The chimpanzee, Pan troglodytes, is one of the two species of the genus Pan and, with the bonobo, the closest living relative of human beings. It is…

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
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
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
biology
Fact· Empirical

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…

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
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
engineering
Proven

Arc Flash Hazard Mitigation in Industrial Electrical Systems

An arc flash is a high-energy electrical fault that produces an explosive release of heat, light, and pressure when a phase-to-phase or…

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
geology
Fact· Empirical

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…

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
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
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
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
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

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
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

Open questions

Hypotheses under investigation and ideas still debated

See all
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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

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
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
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
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
astronomy
Debunked

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…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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

Theories explained

Well substantiated explanations of how things work

See all
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· 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
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· 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
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
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
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· Mathematical

Game Theory

Game theory is the mathematical study of strategic decision making, where the outcome for each participant depends not only on their own choice but…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
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
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
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
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,…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
0 votes0 reviews
engineering
Fact

Canals

Artificial waterways for navigation. Water carries heavy loads at a fraction of the effort land transport requires, and for a period of roughly a…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
engineering
Fact

Roads

Prepared routes for travel over land. Roads are the oldest large-scale infrastructure, the engineering problem they solve is drainage rather than…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
materials science
Fact

Paper

A sheet of matted plant fibre. It replaced every earlier writing surface because it was far cheaper, and the consequences of cheap writing material…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
geography
Fact

Cartography

The making of maps. Every map is a deliberate distortion, because the surface of a sphere cannot be laid flat without stretching something, and every…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
sport
Fact

The Marathon

A running race of 42.195 kilometres. The distance is arbitrary, its founding story is largely legend, and it has become the standard test of…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
religion
Fact

Creation Myths

Traditional accounts of how the world and its inhabitants came to exist. Every documented culture has one, they fall into a small number of recurring…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
anthropology
Fact

Board Games

Games played on a marked surface with pieces. They are among the oldest recorded recreational objects, they appear independently across unconnected…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
anthropology
Fact

Clothing

Coverings worn on the body. Clothing is functional, and its functions are only partly physical: almost everywhere it also signals identity, status…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
art
Fact

Dance

Movement of the body performed for expression, ritual or social purpose, generally in relation to rhythm. It is present in every documented human…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
art
Fact

Sculpture

Three-dimensional art, made by removing material, adding it, or casting it. The method used constrains what can be made, and much of what…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
art
Fact

Photography

Recording images by the action of light on a light-sensitive surface. It required two separate discoveries, projecting an image and fixing it…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
materials science
Fact

Textiles

Fabrics made from fibres. Textile production drove the first industrial mechanisation, it remains among the largest manufacturing sectors, and the…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
geology
Fact

Mining

Extracting minerals from the ground. Every manufactured object contains material that was mined, the industry has been transformed by scale and…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
agriculture
Fact

Forestry

The management of forests for timber, other products and ecological function. It is among the oldest forms of resource management, and its central…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
agriculture
Fact

Irrigation

Supplying water to crops artificially. It made agriculture possible in places rainfall could not support, it is the largest human use of fresh water,…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
agriculture
Fact

Bread

Baked dough of ground grain and water. It is among the oldest prepared foods, it supplies a substantial share of the world's calories, and its…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
physics
Fact

Timekeeping

Measuring the passage of time and dividing it into units. Every method works by counting something that repeats regularly, and the history of the…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
chemistry
Fact

The Battery

A device storing energy chemically and releasing it as electric current. It made electricity portable, and its energy density is the constraint…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
engineering
Fact

Navigation

Determining position and finding a route. For most of history the difficult part was not direction but position, and specifically longitude, which…

byCapsule0 votes0 reviews
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