The scene of Galileo dropping two balls from the Leaning Tower of Pisa comes only from his disciple Vincenzo Viviani, written after Galileo's death, and historians doubt it. Galileo mainly studied falling bodies using inclined planes. The irony: such a drop really was performed, in 1586, from a church tower in Delft, by the Flemish scientist Simon Stevin.
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.