Even iftheoretically discovered long ago, the dilaton, the pseudo-Goldstone boson ofspontaneous breaking of scale invariance, is still subject of activeinvestigations. These not only concern theoretical developments, such as newrealizations based on the AdS/CFT correspondence, but also phenomenologicalapplications. In this talk I will first review the effective theory for thespontaneous breaking of scaling symmetry, next I will present a warpedextra-dimensional model with all the expected features, and finally I willdiscuss two of the potential manifestations of the dilaton in Nature: incosmological phase transitions and in the context of a inflationary universe.