Kilo, mega, giga, tera… In 2022, the General Conference on Weights and Measures added four new SI prefixes: ronna (10²⁷), quetta (10³⁰), and their tiny counterparts ronto and quecto. It was the first addition since 1991. Earth weighs about 6 ronnagrams, and an electron just under one rontogram. Booming data storage also helped push the change.
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.