Highlights from ALICE

The LHC has delivered for the first time collisions of Nuclei in November 2010, at an energy of 2.76 TeV per nucleon pair. which represents a jump of more than an order of magnitude over the highest energy nuclear collisions ever studied before. The high energy, the quality of the state-of-the art detectors, and the readiness of the experimental collaborations at the LHC have allowed a rich harvest of important scientific results in a very short time. In this lecture a short overview will be given of how the results from the LHC, and in particular from the ALICE experiment, have provided new insight on the properties of matter under extreme conditions of temperature and pressure, analogous to the conditions present in the early phases of the evolution of the Universe. First results from the proton-nucleus runs will also be presented.