  I review recent progress in the extraction of unpolarized parton
distributions in the proton and in nuclei from a unified point of view that
highlights how the interplay between high energy particle physics and lower
energy nuclear physics can be of mutual benefit to either field. Areas of
overlap range from the search for physics beyond the standard model at the LHC,
to the study of the non perturbative structure of nucleons and the emergence of
nuclei from quark and gluon degrees of freedom, to the interaction of colored
probes in a cold nuclear medium.
