In this paper, we observe that the brane functional studied in hep-th/9910245 can be used to generalize some of the works that Schoen and I [4] did many years ago. The key idea is that if a three dimensional manifold M has a boundary with strongly positive mean curvature, the effect of this mean curvature can influence the internal geometry of M. For example, if the scalar curvature of M is greater than certain constant related to this boundary effect, no incompressible surface of higher genus can exist.

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A cohomology theory associated to a holomorphic Poisson structure is the hypercohomology of a bicomplex where one of the two operators is the classical -operator, while the other operator is the adjoint action of the Poisson bivector with respect to the Schouten-Nijenhuis bracket. The first page of the associated spectral sequence is the Dolbeault cohomology with coefficients in the sheaf of germs of holomorphic polyvector fields. In this note, the authors investigate the conditions for which this spectral sequence degenerates on the first page when the underlying complex manifolds are nilmanifolds with an abelian complex structure. For a particular class of holomorphic Poisson structures, this result leads to a Hodge-type decomposition of the holomorphic Poisson cohomology. We provide examples when the nilmanifolds are 2-step.

For a path in a compact finite dimensional Alexandrov space X with curv  , the two basic geometric invariants are the length and the turning angle (which measures the closeness from being a geodesic). We show that the sum of the two invariants of any loop is bounded from below in terms of , the dimension, diameter, and Hausdorff measure of X. This generalizes a basic estimate of Cheeger on the length of a closed geodesic in a closed Riemannian manifold ([Ch], [GP1,2]). To see that the above result also generalizes and improves an analog of the Cheeger type estimate in Alexandrov geometry in [BGP], we show that for a class of subsets of X, the n-dimensional Hausdorff measure and rough volume are proportional by a constant depending on n = dim(X).