  Recent developments in our description of RHIC and related heavy-ion
phenomena in terms of hidden local symmetry theories are reviewed with a focus
on the novel nearly massless states in the vicinity of -- both below and above
-- the chiral restoration temperature T_c. We present complementary and
intuitive ways to understand both Harada-Yamawaki's vector manifestation
structure and Brown-Rho scaling -- which are closely related -- in terms of
"melting" of soft glues observed in lattice calculations and join the massless
modes that arise in the vector manifestation (in the chiral limit) just below
T_c to tightly bound massless states above T_c. This phenomenon may be
interpreted in terms of the Beg-Shei theorem. It is suggested that hidden local
symmetry theories arise naturally in holographic dual QCD from string theory,
and a clear understanding of what really happens near the critical point could
come from a deeper understanding of the dual bulk theory. Other matters
discussed are the relation between Brown-Rho scaling and Landau Fermi-liquid
fixed point parameters at the equilibrium density, its implications for
"low-mass dileptons" produced in heavy-ion collisions, the reconstruction of
vector mesons in peripheral collisions, the pion velocity in the vicinity of
the chiral transition point, kaon condensation viewed from the VM fixed point,
nuclear physics with Brown-Rho scaling, and the generic feature of dropping
masses at the RGE fixed points in generalized hidden local symmetry theories.
