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We construct a smooth Artin stack parameterizing the stable weighted curves of genus one with twisted fields and prove that it is isomorphic to the blowup stack of the moduli of genus one weighted curves studied by Hu and Li. This leads to a blowup-free construction of Vakil-Zinger's desingularization of the moduli of genus one stable maps to projective spaces. This construction provides the cornerstone of the theory of stacks with twisted fields, which is thoroughly studied in arXiv:2005.03384 and leads to a blowup-free resolution of the stable map moduli of genus two.

We study rationality properties of quadric surface bundles over the projective plane. We exhibit families of smooth projective complex fourfolds of this type over connected bases, containing both rational and non-rational fibers.

We give an example of a dominant rational self-map of the projective plane whose dynamical degree is a transcendental number.

Powersum varieties, also called varieties of sums of powers, have provided examples of interesting relations between varieties since their first appearance in the 19th century. One of the most useful tools to study them is apolarity, a notion originally related to the action of differential operators on the polynomial ring. In this work, we make explicit how one can see apolarity in terms of the Cox ring of a variety. In this way, powersum varieties are a special case of varieties of apolar schemes; we explicitly describe examples of such varieties in the case of two toric surfaces, when the Cox ring is particularly well-behaved.