Physics Highlights from the ALICE experiment.

The ALICE experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN is optimized to study the physics of strongly interacting matter formed at extreme high temperatures and energy densities created in high-energy heavy ion collisions. This study is carried out by means of proton-proton, proton-lead and lead-lead collisions at centre-of-mass energies in the TeV regime. In this talk the highlights of the recent results from ALICE will be presented. Measurements from Pb-Pb collisions indicate that the matter created in collisions at the LHC is hotter and larger than that at lower energies and behaves like a strongly interacting, nearly perfect liquid. Measurements from pp and p-Pb collisions, which were considered as the baseline comparison for measurements in heavy-ion collisions, are revealing unexpected results that open the search for the smallest droplet of QGP. The future physics program of the ALICE experiment, which will undertake a major upgrade for the detector apparatus during the second LHC long shutdown, scheduled in 2019-2020, will also be illustrated. The motivation and the objective of the upgrade, as well as its implementation, will be discussed.