• Elul is officially underway, the shofar is sounding, and so, it turns out, is GN Israel — back for its second edition, which by our standards counts as a comeback tour. On with the news.
• The economy continues to shrug off the noise around it. Moody's has kept Israel's sovereign credit rating steady at Baa1 with a stable outlook, pointing to high income levels and a resilient technology sector as the ballast, even as defence spending stays elevated. The Tel Aviv market has had a strong run this year and the shekel remains firm, which analysts read as the world quietly voting with its wallet. Cybersecurity remains the star performer: last year brought Israel's two largest-ever foreign investment deals, Google's $32 billion purchase of Wiz and Palo Alto Networks' $25 billion acquisition of CyberArk, both completed this past March. Not a bad way to keep Startup Nation's name on the door.
• Over at the Hebrew University, food scientists have chipped away at one of the last real obstacles to affordable lab-grown steak: the cost of the growth factors that coax stem cells into muscle tissue. By binding those proteins directly onto a plant-derived cellulose scaffold, the team found a way to grow the cells effectively while using far less of the expensive stuff. Cultivated meat has always promised a lot; this is the unglamorous plumbing work that might actually get it onto a plate at a price people will pay.
• Tel Aviv University, meanwhile, has been playing with light rather than meat. Dr Lior Michaeli's team at the Fleischman Faculty of Engineering has built an ultra-thin, programmable optical surface that can steer and reshape a beam of light in 74 femtoseconds — that's 74 quadrillionths of a second, for anyone still working in whole seconds. Components that direct light have always lagged behind light itself; this one, published in Nature Nanotechnology, closes a good part of that gap and could speed up everything from optical computing to next-generation cameras and sensors.
• Jerusalem's Old City has thrown up a find of its own. Archaeologists from the Israel Antiquities Authority, digging at the Kishle near the Tower of David Museum ahead of the new Schulich Wing, have unearthed the first known mold ever found in the city for producing the faces of Judean Pillar Figurines — the small female clay figures that turn up in almost every First Temple-period excavation across Jerusalem and Judah. Cleaned and cast, the 2,600-year-old mold reveals a finely detailed face with an elaborate curly hairstyle, and settles a long debate: these figurines, whatever their exact purpose, were being made right here in Jerusalem, not imported from afar.
• More GN from the mat: at the World Jiu-Jitsu Championships in Abu Dhabi, Israel's delegation kept adding to the medal count across every age group. On the final day, Nimrod Ryder, a two-time World Games gold medalist, took bronze in the senior men's under-85kg division, while 20-year-old Maya Bachar won silver in her senior-level debut after a final decided in the closing seconds against the reigning world champion. A strong championship all round for a small delegation that keeps punching well above its weight.
• Back on dry land, the season itself is a kind of good news: forty days of introspection ahead, a fresh page to write on, and a country that, whatever the headlines say, keeps finding new things worth writing home about.