Drip molten glass into cold water and you get a Prince Rupert's drop. The outside cools instantly and ends up strongly squeezed by the inside. The bulbous head can then withstand a hammer blow. But snap its thin tail and the whole drop bursts into powder in a fraction of a second. Tempered glass works on the same principle.
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.