In the 1920s, Bose and Einstein predicted that in a cold enough gas, atoms would merge into a single quantum state. It took until 1995: Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman chilled rubidium atoms to about 170 billionths of a degree above absolute zero. The cloud then behaved like one giant wave. They shared the 2001 Nobel Prize with Wolfgang Ketterle.
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.