Short answers, pulled from the story.
The four states of matter observable in everyday life are solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. They are distinguished by how their component particles are arranged and how those particles behave collectively.
Plasma is by far the most abundant of the four fundamental states. It makes up 99% of all ordinary matter in the universe because it composes all stars.
Ice has fifteen known crystal structures, meaning fifteen solid phases, which exist at various temperatures and pressures. This shows that a single compound can form different phases within the same state of matter.
Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman of JILA at the University of Colorado at Boulder produced the first such condensate with rubidium atoms in 1995. That same year, Wolfgang Ketterle independently produced one in a gas of sodium atoms. Bose-Einstein condensation itself was predicted in 1925 by Albert Einstein.
Degenerate matter is a series of exotic states that ordinary matter transitions to under extremely high pressure, supported mainly by quantum mechanical effects and the Pauli exclusion principle. Electron-degenerate matter is found inside white dwarf stars, and neutron-degenerate matter is found in neutron stars.
Quark-gluon plasma was detected for the first time in the laboratory at CERN in the year 2000. Theories predicting its existence were developed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and unlike ordinary plasma it flows like a liquid.