In these last years, I've been particularly interested in studying the several applications that can arise in the context of distance geometry. I'll open my talk with one of these new applications, where the aim is to visually adapt geographical maps so that the distances between points of interest are not Euclidean, but they are rather supposed to reflect the difficulty for a given user to travel between pairs of such points. It turns out, thanks to the inclusion of some additional information that is strictly related to the application, that this subclass of problems is solvable in polynomial time, at least in the basic formulation. My talk will continue then by detailing some similar and more recent efforts in the context of protein structure determination. This will also give me the possibility to point out some peculiarities of distance geometry, as for example its close relationship with classical combinatorial problems such as the subset sum problem.