Gravity drops from about 9.83 m/s² at the poles to 9.78 m/s² at the equator, a difference of around 0.5%. Two reasons: Earth's spin creates a slight centrifugal effect, and the equatorial bulge places you farther from the planet's centre. On a scale, a 70-kilogram person would lose about 350 grams.
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.