New results for AdS/CFT and beyond

LateX, 11 pages, 2 figures. Contribution to the proceedings of the RTN meeting "Constituents, Fundamental Forces and symmetries of the Universe'', Corfu, Greece, 20-26 September 2005We report on some recent results within the string/gauge theory correspondence, both in the conformal and in the non conformal cases, for a recently found class of N=1 dual pairs. These results provide the first cross check of AdS/CFT and field theory techniques like a-maximization. Moreover, they furnish new examples of cascading gauge theories and the first instance of 4d dynamical supersymmetry breaking embedded in the correspondenc