In 1927, at the University of Queensland, Thomas Parnell poured pitch, a tar derivative that shatters under a hammer, into a funnel to prove it is actually a liquid. Only nine drops have fallen since, the latest in 2014. The pitch is over a hundred billion times more viscous than water, and its first two custodians never saw a drop fall.
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.