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On June 25, the hottest man-made temperature has been recorded in a huge atom-smasher at New York at 7.2 trillion degrees Fahrenheit - just 250,000 times hotter compared to the sun's core. This achievement occurred in the particle accelerator RHIC (Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider), a 3.9-kilometer tunnel under New York that researchers use to smash particles into one another to replicate conditions that happened a split-second after the Big Bang. Creating the hot temperature in a controlled environment was done in Brookhaven National Laboratory through colliding gold nuclei with each other at the speed of light. Once the collision of ions happened, the huge amount of energy it emits will melt the protons and neutrons in the gold nuclei, turning into a liquid composed of smaller particles called gluons and quarks. At 7 trillion degrees Fahrenheit, normal matter would usually break down into sub-atomic particles, the gluons and quarks that supposedly composed the earliest plasma that scientist thought resembles the thing that consisted the universe right after the Big Bang happened, 13.7 billion years ago. According to the head of the Brookhaven program, particle physicists formerly thought that quarks and gluons would be in gas form but this new study revealed that it is behaving more like a liquid. And while they already expected to get to such extreme temperatures, they were really surprised of it having an almost perfect liquid behavior. Surprisingly, the liquid could occur at both ends of the spectrum - that is, a similar behavior of the liquid in trapped atom samples has been seen at extremely cold temperatures. "Other physicists have now observed quite similar liquid behavior in trapped atom samples at temperatures near absolute zero, ten million trillion times colder than the quark-gluon plasma we create at RHIC," said the head of Brookhaven's particle and nuclear physics program

U.S. Senate Committee hearing on NASA budget and space program By Amanda Doyle, 12 March 2012 Neil deGrasse Tyson gives evidence to the U.S. Senate Committee March 7 2012 U.S. Senate Committee hears submissions on NASA's 2013 budget request & U.S. space program The U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation has been hearing submissions regarding NASA's 2013 budget request and on the priorities, plans and progress of the U.S. space program. Witnesses appearing before the Committee on March 7 included Charles F Bolden Jr, NASA's Administrator, and Dr Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist and well known commentator on space exploration. Bolden, who flew on four space shuttle missions after a career in the Marine Corps, was appointed to lead NASA in 2009 after being nominated by President Obama. Administrator Bolden outlined the space agency's achievements in 2011 and updated the Committee on the status of current missions. His statement outlined how the requested budget of $17.7 billion for 2013 would be allocated and concluded by stating: "NASA's FY 2013 budget request of $17.7 billion represents a substantial investment in a balanced program of science, exploration, technology and aeronautics research. Despite the constrained budget environment facing the Nation, this request supports a robust space program that keeps us on a path to achieving a truly audacious set of goals. NASA is working to send humans to an asteroid and ultimately to Mars, to observe the first galaxies form, and to expand the productivity of humanity's only permanently-crewed space station. We are making air travel safer and more efficient, learning to live and work in space, and developing the critical technologies to achieve these goals. The coming year will include the first commercial cargo flights to the ISS, a nuclear powered robot the size of a small car landing on the surface of Mars, and the launch of the Nation's next land observing satellit