At CERN, by smashing lead nuclei together, physicists at the Large Hadron Collider created a quark-gluon plasma estimated in 2012 at over 5 trillion degrees. That is around 300,000 times hotter than the core of the Sun. This primordial soup resembles the Universe a few microseconds after the Big Bang, and it vanishes almost instantly.
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.