Number 26 (Story #4), March, 22 1991 by Phillip F. Schewe and Ben Stein THE RELATIVISTIC HEAVY ION COLLIDER (RHIC) is now under construction at Brookhaven National Lab, having received from Congress $13.5 million in construction money for FY91; the six-year project will cost a total of $397 million. At RHIC beams of heavy ions such as gold, with energies up to 100 GeV per nucleon, will collide head on, creating extreme states of high nuclear density, perhaps even a plasma of quarks and gluons. This matter density will match that of the universe only one microsecond after the big bang. (RHIC Bulletin, Jan. 1991.)