Soda is supersaturated with carbon dioxide, which only needs a foothold to form bubbles. A Mentos candy's surface, pitted with tiny hollows, offers millions of sites where bubbles form all at once. The gas rushes out and hurls the liquid several metres into the air. No molecule is transformed: it is pure physics.
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.