The talk gives an overview over some recently developed methods in global analysis and geometry that involve conformal factors. First we review a global existence result, obtained with Nicolas Ginoux, for Dirac-Higgs-Yang-Mills systems under the assumption that the underlying spacetime has a conformal extension, which ist the case for solutions to the Einstein equations for initial values in a weighted neighborhood of the standard ones. Then we switch to Riemannian geometry and show, using the novel ‚flatzoomer’ method, that every conformal class contains a metric of bounded geometry. Finally we sketch the consequences of the result for the Yamabe flow on noncompact manifolds and a related result for Cheeger-Gromov convergence of some relevance in the context of positive scalar curvature on compact manifolds.