My research activity has its roots in a series of collaborations at the interface between statistical physics and cosmology/astrophysics. The reason of this interdisciplinary nature is the following: while cosmology/astrophysics is the attempt to build a coherent physical theory to explain the many and diverse observations of the universe at the largest scales, statistical physics is concerned with the understanding of systems with many degrees of freedom, and for this reason the concepts and methods developed in the latter may find a useful application in the former it happened for many other fields as biology, geology, economics etc.