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The natural time scale for internal motion in atoms and small molecules is dictated by their Angstrom size and 10 eV binding energies to be femtoseconds or shorter. The internal binding fields for the outermost electrons is tens of volts per Angstrom. I will describe recent experiments designed to measure the interaction of atoms and molecules with laser fields on these scales of time and field strength. Two kinds of laser sources are employed: Strong focused infrared lasers create these extreme conditions within a single optical cycle, and therefore produce atomic phenomena that evolve during a single cycle of the field. This is the regime of high harmonic generation. X-ray free electron lasers can also produce these extreme conditions, but in the high frequency limit. This is the regime of rapid core ionization.

How order emerges from disorder is one of the fascinating questions in biophysics. In this context, we study the dynamics of cell populations exhibiting universal distributions of protein content and slow collective modes spanning a wide range of time scales. Moreover, our recent experiments show that the growth dynamics of cell populations under challenging conditions, do not obey the conventional population-selection paradigm in which the fastest growing cells take over exponentially fast. Although far from being conclusive, I will attempt in this talk to integrate these different aspects of cell populations into a single conceptual framework of population dynamics. Some features of these dynamics can be demonstrated by a toy model of random organization; randomly colliding particles relaxing into an absorbing state, connecting the intracellular complexity to the population level.