We bring examples of toric varieties blown up at a point in the torus that do not have finitely generated Cox rings. These examples are generalizations of our earlier work, where toric surfaces of Picard number 1 were studied. In this article we consider toric varieties of higher Picard number and higher dimension. In particular, we bring examples of weighted projective 3-spaces blown up at a point that do not have finitely generated Cox rings.

An intrinsic quadric is a normal projective variety with a Cox ring defined by a single quadratic relation. We provide explicit descriptions of these varieties in the smooth case for small Picard numbers. As applications, we figure out in this setting the Fano examples and (affirmatively) test Fujita’s freeness conjecture.

In this short note, we show that a construction by Ottem provides an example of a rationally connected variety that is not birationally equivalent to a Mori dream space with terminal singularities.

We complete Mori's program with symmetric divisors for the moduli space of stable seven-pointed rational curves. We describe all birational models in terms of explicit blow-ups and blow-downs. We also give a moduli theoretic description of the first flip, which has not appeared in the literature.