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In 1994, Sturmfels gave a polyhedral version of the Cayley Trick of elimination theory: he established an order-preserving bijection between the posets of \emph{coherent} mixed subdivisions of a Minkowski sum $\mathcal{A}_1+\cdots+\mathcal{A}_r$ of point configurations and of \emph{coherent} polyhedral subdivisions of the associated Cayley embedding $\mathcal{C}(\mathcal{A}_1,\dots,\mathcal{A}_r)$. In this paper we extend this correspondence in a natural way to cover also \emph{non-coherent} subdivisions. As an application, we show that the Cayley Trick combined with results of Santos on subdivisions of Lawrence polytopes provides a new independent proof of the Bohne-Dress Theorem on zonotopal tilings. This application uses a combinatorial characterization of lifting subdivisions, also originally proved by Santos.
A class of sparse polynomial systems is investigated which is defined by a weighted directed graph and a weighted bipartite graph. They arise in the model of mass action kinetics for chemical reaction systems. In this application the number of real positive solutions within a certain affine subspace is of particular interest. We show that the simplest cases are equivalent to binomial systems while in general the solution structure is highly determined by the properties of the two graphs. First we recall results by Feinberg and give rigorous proofs. Secondly, we explain how the graphs determine the Newton polytopes of the system of sparse polynomials and thus determine the solution structure. The results on positive solutions from real algebraic geometry are applied to this particular situation. Examples illustrate the theoretical results.