I discuss several novel and unexpected aspects of quantum chromodynamics. These include: (a) the nonperturbative origin of intrinsic strange, charm and bottom quarks in the nucleon at large x; the breakdown of pQCD factorization theorems due to the lensing effects of initial- and final-state interactions; (b) important corrections to pQCD scaling for inclusive reactions due to processes in which hadrons are created at high transverse momentum directly in the hard processes and their relation to the baryon anomaly in high-centrality heavy-ion collisions; and (c) the nonuniversality of quark distributions in nuclei. I also discuss some novel theoretical perspectives in QCD: (a) light-front holography - a relativistic color-confining first approximation to QCD based on the AdS/CFT correspondence principle; (b) the principle of maximum conformality - a method which determines the renormalization scale at finite order in perturbation theory yielding scheme independent results; (c) the replacement of quark and gluon vacuum condensates by 'in-hadron condensates' and how this helps to resolve the conflict between QCD vacuum and the cosmological constant.