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Fix a number $g>1$, let $S$ be a close surface of genus $g$ and $\Teich(S)$ be the Teichm\"uller space of $S$ endowed with the Weil-Petersson metric. In this paper we show that the Riemannian sectional curvature operator of $\Teich(S)$ is non-positive definite. As an application we show that any twist harmonic map from rank-one hyperbolic spaces $H_{Q,m}=Sp(m,1)/Sp(m)\cdot Sp(1)$ or $H_{O,2}=F_{4}^{-20}/SO(9)$ into $\Teich(S)$ is a constant.

We show that Norbury’s McShane identity for nonorientable cusped hyperbolic surfaces N generalizes to quasifuchsian representations of π1(N) as well as pseudo-Anosov mapping Klein bottles with singular fibers given by N.

In this article we first show that any finite cover of the moduli space of closed Riemann surfaces of genus $g$ with $g\geq 2$ does not admit any Riemannian metric $ds^2$ of nonnegative scalar curvature such that $ds^2 \succ ||\cdot||_{T}$ where $||\cdot||_T$ is the Teichm\"uller metric. Our second result is the proof that any cover $M$ of the moduli space $\mathbb{M}_{g}$ of a closed Riemann surface $S_{g}$ does not admit any complete Riemannian metric of uniformly positive scalar curvature in the quasi-isometry class of the Teichm\"uller metric, which implies a conjecture of Farb-Weinberger in \cite{Farb-prob}.

The action of the mapping class group of the thrice-punctured projective plane on its GL(2,C) character variety produces an algorithm for generating the simple length spectra of quasi-Fuchsian thrice-punctured projective planes. We apply this algorithm to quasi-Fuchsian representations of the corresponding fundamental group to prove: a sharp upper-bound for the length its shortest geodesic, a McShane identity and the surprising result of non-polynomial growth for the number of simple closed geodesic lengths.