Tails and ties - Editorial: Topical issue on physics in society

The study of behavioural and social phenomena has experienced a surge of interest over the last decade. One reason for this great attention is the huge amount of high quality data made available by the internet technologies. The many studies spanning concepts and problems belonging to economics, biology, ecology, physics and computer science, clearly indicates increasing interdisciplinary cross-fertilization, commonalities in the different approaches and communication across these disciplines. This issue of The European Physical Journal B is devoted to the interdisciplinary field of Sociophysics. The papers have been selected from the contributions presented at the 5th International Conference on 'Applications of Physics in Financial Analysis' (APFA5) held in Torino from June 29th to July 1st 2006 (http://www.polito.it/apfa5). The synergy and richness of results obtained from the investigation of problems belonging to the area of complexity science from different perspectives clearly indicates future directions and research methodologies in this field.