The small Bjorken-x regime of QCD is of great interest since a variety of different phenomena are known or expected to emerge, from BFKL small-x effects and non-linear and saturation dynamics to shadowing corrections in heavy nuclei. In this talk we present recent developments in our understanding of perturbative and non-perturbative QCD at small-x: the evidence for BFKL dynamics in the HERA structure function data, the precision determination of collinear PDFs from charm production at LHCb, and the first results on neural-network based fits of nuclear PDFs. We also highlight the remarkable connection between small-x QCD and high-energy astrophysics, in particular for the theoretical predictions of signal and background event rates at neutrino telescopes such as IceCube and KM3NET