The capital of Brittany is Rennes in the Ille-et-Vilaine department.
The name of Brittany is related to Great Britain (in French, "Grand Bretagne"). The region has also been called "Lesser Britain" or "Little Britain" in the past. After the Anglo-Saxons started arriving in Great Britain in the 5th century, many of the Ancient Britons (Celts) moved to this region. The region may have already had strong ties with the Ancient Britons even before that. These tribes gave Brittany its name, the Breton language, the local place names and many parts of its culture. Brittany was a separate country from the 9th century until it was united with France in 1532. It was a province of France until the French Revolution, when its land was divided in departments. Brittany regained a regional government in the 1980s.
Brittany is the home of the world's largest collection of standing stones in one place, the Carnac stones.
Brittany's main industry is agriculture, in particular: pork farming, chicken farming and the production of maize (for cattle feed). Brittany is also the name of a dog breed.
Standard Model
The Standard Model (SM) of physics is a theory of the elementary particles, which are either fermions or bosons. It also explains three of the four basic forces of nature. The four fundamental forces are: gravity, electromagnetism, the weak force, and the strong force. Gravity is the one the model does not explain.
The model uses the parts of physics called quantum mechanics and special relativity, and the ideas of physical field and symmetry breaking. Some of the mathematics of the SM is group theory, and also as equations which have biggest and smallest points, called Lagrangians and Hamiltonians.
Fermions are particles that join together to make up all "matter" we see. Examples of groups of fermions are the proton and the neutron. Fermions have properties, such as charge and mass, which can be seen in everyday life. They also have other properties, such as spin, weak charge, hypercharge, and color charge, whose effects do not usually appear in everyday life. These properties are given numbers called quantum numbers.
Fermions are particles whose spin numbers equal an odd, positive number times one half: 1/2, 3/2, 5/2, etc. We say that fermions have "half integer spin."
An important fact about fermions is that they follow a rule called the Pauli exclusion principle. This rule says that no two fermions can be in the same "place" at the same time, because no two fermions in an atom can have the same quantum numbers at the same time. Fermions also obey a theory called Fermi-Dirac statistics. The word "fermion" honors the physicist Enrico Fermi.
There are 12 different types of fermions. Each type is called a "flavor." Their names are:
Quarks are grouped into three pairs. Each pair is called a "generation." The first quark in each pair has charge 2/3, and the second quark has charge -1/3. The three kinds of neutrino have a charge of 0. The electron, muon, and tau have charge -1.
Matter is made of atoms, and atoms are made of electrons, protons, and neutrons. Protons and neutrons are made of up and down quarks. You can find one lepton by itself, but you can never find quarks alone. This is because quarks are held together by the color force.
Bosons are the second type of elementary particle in the standard model. All bosons have an integer spin (1, 2, 3, etc..) so many of them can be in the same place at the same time. There are two types of elementary bosons: gauge bosons and the Higgs boson. Gauge bosons are what make the fundamental forces of nature possible. (We are not yet sure if gravity works through a gauge boson.) Every force that acts on fermions happens because gauge bosons are moving between the fermions, carrying the force. Bosons follow a theory called Bose-Einstein statistics. The word "boson" honors the Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose.
The standard model says that there are:
These particles have all been seen either in nature or in the laboratory. The model also predicts that there is a Higgs boson. The model says that fermions have mass (they are not just pure energy) because Higgs bosons travel back and forth between them. The Higgs boson is believed to have been discovered on July 4th, 2012. It is the particle that gives mass to other particles.
There are four basic known forces of nature. Three of these forces affect fermions, and are carried by bosons traveling between those fermions. The standard model explains these three forces.
The other force affects all particles (fermions and bosons) and is not known to have an associated boson.
The strong and weak forces are only seen inside the nucleus of an atom. They only work over very tiny distances: distances that are about as far as a proton is wide. The electromagnetic force and gravity work over any distance, but the strength of these forces goes down as the affected objects get farther apart. The force goes down with the square of the distance between the affected objects: for example, if two objects become twice as far away from each other, the force of gravity between them goes down to a quarter (2=4).
The standard model falls short of being a theory of everything.
The standard model is believed to be theoretically self-consistent. It has demonstrated huge and continued successes in experimental predictions, but it does leave some things unexplained.
Moldovan language
Moldovan () is the official language of Moldova. It is almost the same as Romanian. The main difference is that Moldovan was written in the Cyrillic alphabet because Moldova was part of the Soviet Union until 1989. In 1989, Moldova became its own country and started to use the Latin alphabet, which is used in Romania. On 5 December 2013, the Moldovan government chose Romanian as the official language.
In the unrecognized state of Transnistria, one of the official languages is still Moldovan and is still written with the Cyrillic alphabet. The other official languages are Russian and Ukrainian.
List of states with limited recognition
In international law a political entity needs to fulfill different criteria to become a state: One of these criteria is that other states must recognize it as a state. If more states recognize it, becoming a "de jure" sovereign state will be easier.
Many of the territories listed below broke off (separated themselves) from their original parent state, and so they are often referred to as "break-away" states. They may have some military protection and informal diplomatic representation abroad. Another state may help them avoid forced reincorporation into its original state.
United Nations member states that are only partially recognized by the totality of the other UN members are not listed here. (For example, 39 countries do not recognize Israel.)
Created by the Republic of South Africa from its own territory
These regimes had control over the territory of a country for which most other states recognized a different government as being the legitimate government:
Electrical resistance
The electrical resistance of an electrical conductor is a measure of the difficulty of passing an electric current through a substance. It explains the relationship between voltage (amount of electrical pressure) and the current (flow of electricity). With more resistance in a circuit, less electricity will flow through the circuit. The inverse of resistance is conductance, a measure not much used. All objects have some resistance, except superconductors.
Resistance, discovered by Georg Simon Ohm in 1827, is the ratio between voltage and current. Ohm's law said that the voltage between any two points in a conductor changes directly as the current between the two points, given the temperature remains the same. He described it with the equation:
which models the ratio, where: