We show that being a general fibre of a Mori fibre space is a rather restrictive condition for a Fano variety. More specifically, we obtain two criteria (one sufficient and one necessary) for a Q-factorial Fano variety with terminal singularities to be realised as a fibre of a Mori fibre space, which turn into a characterisation in the rigid case. We apply our criteria to figure out this property up to dimension three and on rational homogeneous spaces. The smooth toric case is studied and an interesting connection with K-semistability is also investigated.

Abstract. We study the behaviour of Chern numbers of three dimensional terminal varieties under divisorial contractions.

The aim of this paper is to study all the natural first steps of the minimal model program for the moduli space of stable pointed curves. We prove that they admit a modular interpretation, and we study their geometric properties. As a particular case, we recover the first few Hassett–Keel log canonical models. As a by-product, we produce many birational morphisms from the moduli space of stable pointed curves to alternative modular projective compactifications of the moduli space of pointed curves.

We show that many spin 6-manifolds have the homotopy type but not the homeomorphism type of a Kähler manifold. Moreover, for given Betti numbers, there are only finitely many deformation types and hence topological types of smooth complex projectve spin threefolds of general type. Finally, on a fixed spin 6-manifold, the Chern numbers take on only finitely many values on all possible Kähler structures.