2001: “Brookhaven Labs has produced for the first time collisions of gold nuclei at a center of mass energy of 200GeV/nucleon.”

2002: “There may be a new type of matter according to researchers at Brookhaven National Laboratory.”

2010: The hottest man-made temperatures ever achived were a record 4 trillion degree plasma experiment at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York… anointed the Guinness record holder.”

2023: “Scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory have uncovered an entirely new kind of quantum entanglement.”

2026: On Friday, February 6, “a control room full of scientists, administrators and members of the press gathered” at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Lab in Upton, New York to witness its final collisions, reports Scientific American:

The vibe had been wistful, but the crowd broke into applause as Darío Gil, the Under Secretary for Science at the U.S. Department of Energy, pressed a red button to end the collider’s quarter-century saga… “I’m really sad” [said Angelika Drees, a BNL accelerator physicist]. “It was such a beautiful experiment and my research home for 27 years. But we’re going to put something even better there.”

That “something” will be a far more powerful electron-ion collider to further push the frontiers of physics, extend RHIC’s legacy and maintain the lab’s position as a center of discovery. This successor will be built in part from RHIC’s bones, especially from one of its two giant, subterranean storage rings that once held the retiring collider’s supply of circulating, near-light speed nuclei…slated for construction over the next decade. [That Electron-Ion Collider, or EIC] will utilize much of RHIC’s infrastructure, replacing one of its ion rings with a new ring for cycling electrons. The EIC will use those tiny, fast-flying electrons as tiny knives for slicing open the much larger gold ions. Physicists will get an unrivaled look into the workings of quarks and gluons and yet another chance to grapple with nature’s strongest force. “We knew for the EIC to happen, RHIC needed to end,” says Wolfram Fischer, who chairs BNL’s collider-accelerator department. “It’s bittersweet.”

EIC will be the first new collider built in the US since RHIC. To some, it signifies the country’s reentry into a particle physics landscape it has largely ceded to Europe and Asia over the past two decades. “For at least 10 or 15 years,” says Abhay Deshpande, BNL’s associate laboratory director for nuclear and particle physics, “this will be the number one place in the world for [young physicists] to come.”

The RHIC was able “to separately send two protons colliding with precisely aligned spins — something that, even today, no other experiment has yet matched,” the article points out:

During its record-breaking 25-year run, RHIC illuminated nature’s thorniest force and its most fundamental constituents. It created the heaviest, most elaborate assemblages of antimatter ever seen. It nearly put to rest a decades-long crisis over the proton’s spin. And, of course, it brought physicists closer to the big bang than ever before…

When RHIC at last began full operations in 2000, its initial heavy-ion collisions almost immediately pumped out quark-gluon plasma. But demonstrating this beyond a shadow of a doubt proved in some respects more challenging than actually creating the elusive plasma itself, with the case for success strengthening as RHIC’s numbers of collisions soared. By 2010 RHIC’s scientists were confident enough to declare that the hot soup they’d been studying for a decade was hot and soupy enough to convincingly constitute a quark-gluon plasma. And it was even weirder than they thought. Instead of the gas of quarks and gluons theorists expected, the plasma acted like a swirling liquid unprecedented in nature. It was nearly “perfect,” with zero friction, and set a new record for twistiness, or “vorticity.” For Paul Mantica, a division director for the Facilities and Project Management Division in the DOE’s Office of Nuclear Physics, this was the highlight of RHIC’s storied existence. “It was paradigm-changing,” he says…

Data from the final run (which began nearly a year ago) has already produced yet another discovery: the first-ever direct evidence of “virtual particles” in RHIC’s subatomic puffs of quark-gluon plasma, constituting an unprecedented probe of the quantum vacuum.

RHIC’s last run generated hundreds of petabytes of data, the article points out, meaning its final smash “isn’t really the end; even when its collisions stop, its science will live on.”

But Science News notes RHIC’s closure “marks the end for the only particle collider operating in the United States, and the only collider of its kind in the world. Most particle accelerators are unable to steer two particle beams to crash head-on into one another.”

Even though we’re months away from its anticipated launch, a new leak about Apple’s iPhone 18 Pro Max raises serious concerns about Samsung’s purported Galaxy S26 Ultra.

According to renowned tipster Digital Chat Station, the iPhone 18 Pro Max will feature a larger battery compared to the iPhone 17 Pro Max. While the Chinese version of the handset could feature a 5,000 mAh battery, international variants could offer an even bigger upgrade.

Early iPhone 18 Pro Max put battery life back in the spotlight

The iPhone 18 Pro Max version sold outside China could have a battery capacity between 5,100 and 5,200 mAh. The exact battery size could depend on whether the version has a physical SIM or supports eSIM only. Why do I say that?

The iPhone 17 Pro Max features a 4,823 mAh battery on variants with a physical SIM slot, and a slightly larger 5,088 mAh battery on units without one. So, there’s a chance that the iPhone 18 Pro Max with and without a SIM slot could come with different batteries in the range.

These numbers might not impress you on paper, especially when compared to the 6,000 or 7,000 mAh battery cells on modern Android flagships (like the OnePlus 15), but when it comes to real-world use, the iPhone 17 Pro Max is among the longest-lasting phones on a single charge.

Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra suddenly looks vulnerable

Given that Samsung’s purported Galaxy S26 Ultra is rumored to ship with a 5,000 mAh battery (the same as the Galaxy S20 Ultra, which debuted six years ago) and the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chipset based on 3nm fabrication technology, the iPhone 18 Pro Max should easily outlast it.

With a battery that can hold more charge, a chipset that consumes less power (likely the 2nm A20 Pro chip), and the highly-optimized iOS operating system, the iPhone 18 Pro Max might offer more screen-on time between charges than the Galaxy S26 Ultra.

If the leak holds true, the iPhone 18 Pro Max could hold well not just against the Galaxy S26 Ultra, but the Android flagships of 2026 that feature gargantuan batteries, proving that efficiency, not just raw capacity, is what truly matters.