The origins of the most energetic particles in the Universe have been a long-standing puzzle. In the quest to identify their sources, it is crucial to understand how these particles are accelerated, how they escape their production sites, and which paths they take on their journey to Earth. The multi-messenger framework has proven to be a powerful tool for exploring the Universe at these extreme energies. In this talk, I will focus on the triad of (ultra-)high-energy messengers: cosmic rays, neutrinos, and gamma rays.

The discovery of the Higgs boson added a fundamental piece to the Standard Model, but it also opened new questions about the nature of electroweak symmetry breaking and possible connections to hidden sectors. A broad class of models predicts new resonances below the Higgs mass, despite the mainstream interest in the high energy regime, such as light scalars/pseudoscalars, or dark mediators that could evade traditional search strategies.

It might seem that mainstream in Quantum Computing nowadays is completely focused on beating classical computers -quantum supremacy- in tasks with -quantum utility- or without practical applications. However, it might be instructive to recall that this area of research was born and developed mostly due to theoretical curiosity, namely from the exploration of fundamental properties of quantum mechanics, such as quantum entanglement.

Fission is the nuclear process by which a nucleus splits into fragments. Although this reaction was discovered nearly 90 years ago, it remains a major fundamental challenge, both experimentally, as data are difficult to obtain and interpret, and theoretically, as no existing model can yet simultaneously reproduce experimental results, provide reliable predictive power, and offer a consistent physical interpretation of the process.