In 1961, physicist Rolf Landauer showed that erasing a single bit of information must release a minimum amount of heat, tied to entropy. At room temperature this floor is tiny, around three billionths of a billionth of a joule. In 2012, an experiment published in Nature measured it directly. Information is not abstract after all: it obeys the laws of thermodynamics.
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.