Einstein's 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics honored his explanation of the photoelectric effect, not relativity, which was still considered too controversial. In 1905 he had proposed that light comes in grains of energy, later called photons. The irony: this quantum pioneer then spent decades challenging how physicists interpreted the quantum theory he had helped launch.
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.