A coin is light and flat, so as it falls it tumbles and the air quickly slows it down. It tops out at a terminal speed of a few tens of km/h, reached after only a few tens of metres. Dropped from the hundredth floor, it lands barely faster than from the tenth: enough to sting, not to kill.
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.