Water's boiling point depends on pressure. By trapping steam, a pressure cooker roughly doubles the pressure inside, so water only boils at around 120 °C. Those extra 20 degrees speed cooking up enormously: a stew is ready about two to three times faster. Hospital autoclaves sterilise instruments on the same principle.
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.