Have you ever been amazed by a curveball goal scored by Diego Maradona, Lionel Messi or Christiano Ronaldo? Then you have—possibly without knowing it—been exposed to the Magnus effect: the fact that spinning objects tend to move along curved paths. In a new publication that appeared in Physical Review Letters this week, Robert Spreeuw shows that the same effect occurs to atoms moving through light—and that this effect has practical consequences.