We prove the following conjecture of Z.-W. Sun [‘On congruences related to central binomial coefficients’, J. Number Theory 13(11) (2011), 2219–2238]. Let p be an odd prime. Then

$$ \begin{align*} \sum_{k=1}^{p-1}\frac{\binom{2k}k}{k2^k}\equiv-\frac12H_{{(p-1)}/2}+\frac7{16}p^2B_{p-3}\pmod{p^3}, \end{align*} $$

where $H_n$ is the nth harmonic number and $B_n$ is the nth Bernoulli number. In addition, we evaluate $\sum _{k=0}^{p-1}(ak+b)\binom {2k}k/2^k$ modulo $p^3$ for any p-adic integers $a, b$.

We prove and generalise a conjecture in [MPP4] about the asymptotics of $\frac{1}{\sqrt{n!}} f^{\lambda/\mu}$ , where $f^{\lambda/\mu}$ is the number of standard Young tableaux of skew shape $\lambda/\mu$ which have stable limit shape under the $1/\sqrt{n}$ scaling. The proof is based on the variational principle on the partition function of certain weighted lozenge tilings.