The purpose of this short article is to prove a product formula relating the log Gromov-Witten invariants of V×W with those of V and W in the case the log structure on V is trivial.

For ordinary flops, the correspondence defined by the graph closure is shown to give equivalence of Chow motives and to preserve the Poincaré pairing. In the case of simple ordinary flops, this correspondence preserves the big quantum cohomology ring after an analytic continuation over the extended Kähler moduli space. For Mukai flops, it is shown that the birational map for the local models is deformation equivalent to isomorphisms. This implies that the birational map induces isomorphisms on the full quantum rings and all the quantum corrections attached to the extremal ray vanish.

We prove that all monomials of κ-classes and ψ-classes are independent in $R^k(\ocM_{g,n})/R^k(\partial\ocM_{g,n})$ for all k≤[g/3]. We also give a simple argument for κ_l≠0 in $R^l(\ocM_g)$ for l≤g−2.

Let X denote an equivariant embedding of a connected reductive group X over an algebraically closed field X . Let X denote a Borel subgroup of X and let X denote a X -orbit closure in X . When the characteristic of X is positive and X is projective we prove that X is globally X -regular. As a consequence, X is normal and Cohen-Macaulay for arbitrary X and arbitrary characteristics. Moreover, in characteristic zero it follows that X has rational singularities. This extends earlier results by the second author and M. Brion.

We verify the Invariance Conjectures of tautological equations in genus two. In particular, a uniform derivation of all known genus two equations is given.