We show that any exceptional non-trivial Dehn surgery on a twist knot, except the trefoil, yields a $3$-manifold whose fundamental group is left-orderable. This is a generalization of a result of Clay, Lidman and Watson, and also gives a new supporting evidence for a conjecture of Boyer, Gordon and Watson.

We show that closed $\widetilde{\mathbb{SL}} \times \mathbb{E}^n$-manifolds are topologically rigid if $n\geq 2$, and are rigid up to $s$-cobordism, if $n=1$.

We show that there is an infinite family of hyperbolic knots such that each knot admits a cyclic surgery $m$ whose adjacent surgeries $m-1$ and $m+1$ are toroidal. This gives an affirmative answer to a question asked by Boyer and Zhang.

We study the topological $4$-dimensional surgery problem for a closed connected orientable topological $4$-manifold $X$ with vanishing second homotopy and $\pi_1(X)\cong A * F(r)$, where $A$ has one end and $F(r)$ is the free group of rank $r\ge 1$. Our result is related to a theorem of Krushkal and Lee, and depends on the validity of the Novikov conjecture for such fundamental groups.

For a non-trivial knot in the $3$-sphere, only integral Dehn surgery can create a closed $3$-manifold containing a projective plane. If we restrict ourselves to hyperbolic knots, the corresponding claim for a Klein bottle is still true. In contrast to these, we show that non-integral surgery on a hyperbolic knot can create a closed non-orientable surface of any genus greater than two.

We give an algorithm for a surgery description of a $p$-fold cyclic branched cover of $B^3$ branched along a tangle. We generalize constructions of Montesinos and Akbulut-Kirby.