Turbulence is ubiquitous. Advances in transportation, energy harvesting, chemical processing, climatology, atmospheric and marine pollution are obstructed by the lack of understanding of turbulence. The reason is that turbulence underlies all natural and technological flows as soon as mass transport is large. Turbulence is also one of the fundamental problems of classical physics unsolved yet. As a matter of fact, turbulence is considered theoretically difficult to attack, experimentally hard and computationally intensive.

In this talk I will present a modern view of turbulence,  touching those fundamental open questions pertaining to all flows in nature,  as the natural tendency to produce strong and unpredictable vortex structures and its consequences for turbulent control, turbulent mixing and turbulent modeling.  Finally, I will also present a short guided tour about 'non ideal' turbulence, all those cases where the flow is strongly influenced by  the external environment as in presence of rotation or of a mean magnetic field for conducting fluids.