High schoolers Rotem Saban, Noam Fogel and Roba Natur are the winners of the 25^th annual National Biology Olympics held at Bar-Ilan University. Each of the winners will receive a scholarship to the University's Mina and Everard Goodman Faculty of Life Sciences.

Bar-Ilan University and Doral Group, an entrepreneurial company in the field of renewable energy, have signed a series of agreements for strategic collaboration. Doral will become a member of Bar-Ilan's Energy and Sustainability Center, and the entities will work to promote research, development, and commercialization of several issues, as well as identify and realize joint business opportunities in response to global challenges in the fields of renewable energy, climate and environment. The agreements were signed through BIRAD, Bar-Ilan Research and Development company.

Ed Sheeran’s song Shivers is as likely to appeal to extraverts living in the UK as those living in Argentina or India. Those with neurotic traits in the US are as likely to be into Nirvana’s Smells like Teen Spirit as people with a similar personality living in Denmark or South Africa. Agreeable people the world over will tend to like Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, or Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper’s Shallow; while national borders cannot stop open people from replaying David Bowie’s Space Oddity or Nina Simone.

Some might view games as merely entertainment but for Prof. Emanuele Dalla Torre at Bar-Ilan University and his team, playing games is useful for measuring the effectiveness of today’s commercial quantum computers.

Two Bar-Ilan University researchers - Prof. Michal Alberstein, of the Faculty of Law, and Prof. Sharon Ruthstein, of the Department of Chemistry and Institute of Nanotechnology and Advanced Materials - are the recipients of European Research Council (ERC) Proof of Concept (PoC) grants for their innovation proposals: MULTIDOOR and Hypo-Imag.

The Proof of Concept grant provides complementary funding to Starting, Consolidator, Advanced and Synergy grantees to enable ERC-funded ideas to progress on the path from groundbreaking research towards innovation.

Vitamin D is most often recognized for its role in bone health, but low levels of the supplement have been associated with a range of autoimmune, cardiovascular, and infectious diseases. Early on in the pandemic health officials began to encourage people to take vitamin D, as it plays a role in promoting immune response and could protect against COVID-19.

A new study, led by researchers from Bar-Ilan University, Ono Academic College, The University of Tulsa, and the Israel Antiquities Authority, presents a 1.5-million-year-old human vertebra discovered in Israel's Jordan Valley. According to the research published on February 2 in the journal Scientific Reports, ancient human migration from Africa to Eurasia was not a one-time event but occurred in waves. The first wave reached the Republic of Georgia in the Caucasus approximately 1.8 million years ago.