We review a number of recent applications of nested lattice coding. In particular, we consider a class of network-coded two-user cognitive interference channel where one sender has the two messages and other sender has a rank-deficient linear combination of the two messages, and show that lattice coding can achieve 2 degrees of freedom and in general, a significant improvement of the generalized degrees of freedom, while it is known that the standard cognitive case does not improve the degrees of freedom. We consider also applications to a two-unicast two-hop MIMO network and show that lattice coding yields the best known degrees of freedom and a sizable finite SNR performance.