CERN has been making antimatter for decades, but in tiny amounts: less than ten billionths of a gram in total. According to the lab, annihilating the whole lot would power a light bulb for only a few hours. Antimatter bombs from thrillers remain fiction: at this rate, producing a single gram would take around a billion years.
Cooled below −183 °C, oxygen turns into a pale blue liquid. Pour it between the poles of a strong magnet and, instead of flowing away, it hangs suspended between them. The reason lies in its unpaired electrons, which respond to the magnetic field. Liquid nitrogen, by contrast, is colourless and pours straight through.
In 2012, Felix Baumgartner jumped from a capsule hanging beneath a balloon, about 39 kilometres up. In that extremely thin air almost nothing slowed him down, and he reached around 1,358 km/h in free fall, or Mach 1.25. He became the first person to exceed the speed of sound with nothing but his own body.