Stealing Thunder With Tornadoes [Updated]

So I do my periodic scan of all things internet using Google's new portal site, and lo and behold, I see that "MIT physicists create new form of matter" on slashdot.  Now this was strange to me: hadn't we just seen MIT "Physicists serve up 'perfect' liquid"?  Was the MIT press office repeating itself?  Turns out that the atomic guys may once again be stealing our thunder, as the Ketterle group at MIT has created tiny tornadoes (i.e. vortices) in a rotating droplet of ultracold superfluid Lithium-6.  Don't they have enough Nobel Prizes already?  We've been through this story before with the "Observation of a Strongly Interacting Degenerate Fermi Gas of Atoms" (Feshbach resonance, infinite scattering length - similar to what's shown in the diagram to the right) but this is starting to hit closer to home:

The superfluid Fermi gas created at MIT can also serve as an easily controllable model system to study properties of much denser forms of fermionic matter such as solid superconductors, neutron stars or the quark-gluon plasma that existed in the early universe.

As soon as the users' meeting is finally over (almost there!), I'm going to have to think about this.  A lot.

[Update: I've thought about it a bit more.  It really can't be said that this result steals the thunder of the RHIC results, also showing near-perfect fluid behavior.  The RHIC result remains essentially weird, since RHIC doesn't have the means to trap the atoms, let them equilibrate, and then rotate the fluid - we just seem to make it every time we crash nuclei together.  But the overall similarity in the language points to the intriguing fact that very different systems at different temperatures (ranging from the sub-kelvin physics shown above, to the tera-kelvin physics at RHIC) can show fluid, and even perfect fluid behavior.  So rather than competition, it's an elegant example of the generality of physical law.  Neat, eh?  But I still want to know who's eventually going to get a Nobel prize for this...]