Interesting news about conditions in the earliest epoch of the Universe. As best I understand it, this confirms predictions made by SU(4) – the standard model.

PHYSICS NEWS UPDATE
The American Institute of Physics Bulletin of Physics News
Number 728 April 20, 2005 by Phillip F. Schewe, Ben Stein

AN OCEAN OF QUARKS. Nuclear physicists have now demonstrated that
the material essence of the universe at a time mere microseconds
after the big bang consists of a ubiquitous quark-gluon liquid.
This huge insight comes from an experiment carried out over the past
five years at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), the giant
crusher of nuclei located at Brookhaven National Lab, where
scientists have created a toy version of the cosmos amid high-energy
collisions. RHIC is of course not a telescope pointed at the sky
but an underground accelerator on Long Island; it is, nevertheless,
in effect, a precision cosmology instrument for viewing a very early
portion of the universe, a wild era long before the time of the
first atoms (which formed about 400,000 years after the big bang),
before the first compound nuclei such as helium (about a minute
after the big bang), before even the time when protons are thought
to have formed into stable entities (ten microseconds).