To feel a static shock when touching a doorknob, your body must be charged to about 3,000 volts. After walking across carpet on a dry day, it can exceed 10,000 volts. It is harmless because the stored charge is tiny and drains away in a fraction of a microsecond. But it is enough to destroy a delicate electronic component.
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.