We illustrate the general principle that in biophysics, econophysics and possibly even city growth, the conceptual framework provided by scaling and universality may be of use in making sense of complex statistical data. Specifically, we discuss recent work on DNA sequences, heartbeat intervals,...

We discuss examples of complex systems composed of many interacting subsystems. We focus on those systems displaying nontrivial long-range correlations. These include the one-dimensional sequence of base pairs in DNA, the sequence of flight times of the large seabird Wandering Albatross, and the...