The charm, beauty and top quark masses are constants of nature which provide important natural scales for perturbative expansions in the context of Quantum ChromoDynamics (QCD).
This is exploited to present and interpret some of the the most recent measurements on charm, beauty and top production at HERA and LHC, with scales ranging from few GeV to few TeV. Special emphasis is placed on the measurement of the heavy quark masses and the confirmation of their expected QCD running, and some of the subtleties this imposes on the theoretical interpretation of QCD measurements. The impact on heavy quark fragmentation and measurements of the proton structure is also discussed. The final message is that relating measurements at extremely different scales through a common theoretical framework results in an improved understanding of some of the fundamental parameters of nature.