When you flip a switch, the light comes on instantly. Yet in an ordinary copper wire, electrons typically drift at a fraction of a millimetre per second. What races at a large fraction of light speed is the electric field pushing them all at once. In alternating current, they barely travel at all: they just jiggle back and forth in place.
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.