The ice in your freezer is just one form among many. By tweaking pressure and temperature, physicists have identified more than twenty crystal structures of ice, numbered with Roman numerals. Some exist only under colossal pressures, and one stays solid far above 100 °C. They are thought to be common deep inside icy moons and distant planets.
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.