In 1999, Lene Hau's team at Harvard sent a laser beam through a cloud of atoms chilled to near absolute zero. Light, which normally races at 300,000 km per second, crawled through it at about 17 metres per second. Two years later, the same team managed to stop it completely, then release it again.
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.