The book collects a few articles on QCD and heavy quarks by close colleagues and friends of Prof. Dr. Nikolai Uraltsev, who passed away early and unexpectedly in 2013. Nikolai Uraltsev was an excellent theorist and a wonderful friend, and this book is to honor his ground breaking work in fundamental physics, such as CP violation, instantons and renormalons in QCD, and in particular his work on the heavy quark expansion.The book summarizes some aspects of QCD from a special perspective, which is relevant for the applications of QCD in the context of weak interactions. This includes CP violation in hadronic processes as well as the hadronic matrix elements in weak decays. The reader will get insight into the special way of understanding fundamental physics, which was peculiar of our former colleague Nikolai Uraltsev.

This book is dedicated to Lev Okun, who passed away in November 2015. He was a true pioneer in probing fundamental dynamics.The book has two objectives. First is to showcase Okun's impact for decades since 1963, when he published his remarkable book Weak Interaction of Elementary Particles. Second is to present the current progress of our scientific community in the studies of our Universe. New directions and possible future developments are discussed, often using the past as a guide. The authors mostly focus on CP asymmetries in the transitions of hadrons and leptons, but they also discuss their rare decays, and talk about axions and supersymmetry, and possible connections with dark matter, extra dimensions, baryogenesis and multiverse.This book is suitable for readers who know quantum mechanics and quantum field theories in general.