This week is the perfect time to take stock of your personal achievements from the past year. Did you lose those 10 pounds? Get that new job? Finish that screenplay? Effectively bend the fabric of space?
That's exactly what David Pares is attempting to do inside his Omaha garage. Pares, 62, spends a couple hours each day fiddling with an array of mechanisms that, when used in chorus, literally condense a small amount of physical space before his eyes. As reported by Omaha.com:
Jack Kasher, a retired physics professor at the University of Nebraska, said that he "wouldn't be surprised" if NASA latches on to Pares' experiment. Meanwhile, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope just discovered a new galaxy in relative proximity to the Milky Way. The dwarf galaxy, called KKs3, is roughly 7 million light years from the Milky Way and has existed for at least 12 billion years, but was just recently photographed by the Hubble, and it now joins the more than 50 known galaxies in our "Local Group."
And over in Switzerland, researchers at CERN are preparing to turn the famed Large Hadron Collider back on—this time with twice the power. The machine, which was the subject of this year's excellent documentary, Particle Fever, was powered down in 2012 and has been undergoing a $150 million upgrade over the past three years. The LHC successfully identified the Higgs boson (a.k.a. the "God particle") during its first round of experiments. Scientists now hope the new machine will provide a deeper understanding of dark matter, and therefore, the very fundamentals of the universe.
So, did you lose that weight?
Originally published at Esquire.
John Hendrickson is the Deputy Editor of Esquire.com, where he oversees the site's 24/7 news operation as well as all politics coverage.