Recent milestones from STAR: new developments and open questions

In these proceedings, an overview of recent STAR results on selected topics is presented. These results utilize Au+Au collisions at various energies, and are aimed at understanding the properties of QED and QCD, characterizing the quark-gluon plasma, as well as searching for the possible critical point in the QCD phase diagram. Specifically, following measurements are discussed: global hyperon polarization, net-proton fluctuations, low transverse momentum dimuon pair production, hyperon-baryon correlations, and f0(980) elliptic flow.