Each soap molecule has a head drawn to water and a long tail that shuns water but loves grease. The tails dive into greasy dirt and surround it, forming tiny spheres called micelles that water rinses away. Soap also breaks apart the fatty envelope of many viruses, which is why a good handwash works so well.
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.