Strangeness in Quark Matter 2013: Opening Talk

We discuss several new developments in the field of strange and heavy flavor physics in high energy heavy ion collisions. As shown by many recent theoretical works, heavy flavored particles give us a unique opportunity to study the properties of systems created in these collisions. Two in particular important aspects, the production of (multi) strange hypernuclei and the properties of heavy flavor mesons, are at the core of several future facilities and will be discussed in detail.