Turning one gram of ice at 0 °C into water at 0 °C takes about 334 joules, without the thermometer moving a single degree. The same energy would warm that gram of liquid water by roughly 80 °C. This latent heat goes into breaking apart the crystal. That is why an ice cube chills your drink far better than the same amount of ice-cold water.
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.