Normal cyclic polytopes and cyclic polytopes that are not very ample

Let $d$ and $n$ be positive integers with $n \geq d + 1$ and $\tau_{1}, ..., \tau_{n}$ integers with $\tau_{1} < ... < \tau_{n}$. Let $C_{d}(\tau_{1}, ..., \tau_{n}) \subset \RR^{d}$ denote the cyclic polytope of dimension $d$ with $n$ vertices $(\tau_{1},\tau_{1}^{2},...,\tau_{1}^{d}), ..., (\tau_{n},\tau_{n}^{2},...,\tau_{n}^{d})$. We are interested in finding the smallest integer $\gamma_{d}$ such that if $\tau_{i+1} - \tau_{i} \geq \gamma_{d}$ for $1 \leq i < n$, then $C_{d}(\tau_{1}, ..., \tau_{n})$ is normal. One of the known results is $\gamma_{d} \leq d (d + 1)$. In the present paper a new inequality $\gamma_{d} \leq d^{2} - 1$ is proved. Moreover, it is shown that if $d \geq 4$ with $\tau_{3} - \tau_{2} = 1$, then $C_{d}(\tau_{1}, ..., \tau_{n})$ is not very ample.