In 1669, the German alchemist Hennig Brand was hunting for the philosopher's stone. He boiled down buckets of urine, then heated the residue fiercely. He obtained a white substance that glowed in the dark: phosphorus, whose name means light-bearer. It is the first element whose discoverer we know by name.
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.