In 1964, Peter Higgs and other physicists predicted a mechanism that gives elementary particles their mass, along with a matching particle. It took the world's largest accelerator to track it down: CERN announced the discovery on 4 July 2012. The following year, Peter Higgs and François Englert received the Nobel Prize in Physics.
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.