Comment on "Fracking and the scope for public dissent" : The sentencing of The Frack Three (Richard Roberts, Simon Blevins, Richard Loizou, (Case Number T20180167)) and R v Roberts (Richard) [2018] EWCA Crim 2739

The recent ELR case comment1 on 'fracking and the scope for public dissent' is interesting, but perhaps lacks balance. Hawkins sets out the legal process regarding one particular case regarding fracking protestors and some of the wider context. She argues that this case is 'but one manifestation of the increased use of legal mechanisms to restrict protest'. She raises and critiques some of the recent events around fracking in the UK

Quantitative analysis of the effect of leflunomide on neural crest cell gene regulation during early embryonic development

The neural crest is a transient population of cells that arises at the border between the neural and non-neural ectoderm. These cells are induced, undergo an epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition, and then migrate along stereotypical pathways to form an array of derivatives such as pigment cells, cranio-facial cartilage and sensory neurons. Neural crest cells have long been studied and much about these cells and their interactions is still not fully understood. The small molecule compound leflunomide inhibits neural crest development. Leflunomide’s mode of action is to inhibit pyrimidine biosynthesis, thereby, preventing RNA transcription. Neural crest genes are actively transcribed and like many embryonic stem cells and tumour cells genes undergo an increased level of transcriptional pausing and subsequent elongation making a number of these genes sensitive to leflunomide. It was unclear at what stage of neural crest development leflunomide was acting. Here, I initially developed a quantitative approach using real-time PCR to measure gene expression in Xenopus. Secondly, using real-time PCR I have shown that neural plate border genes are not affected by leflunomide. Thirdly, the neural crest specification genes are affected and the pan neural plate marker Sox2 is not affected by leflunomide. I have confirmed by quantitative real-time PCR that the expression of genes involved in neural crest specification the proto-oncogene cMyc and cMyc responsive genes are affected. cMyc is implicated in embryonic stem cell transcriptional elongation and is well characterised to play an important role in neural crest specification

Quantum energy inequalities in two dimensions

Quantum energy inequalities (QEIs) were established by Flanagan for the massless scalar field on two-dimensional Lorentzian spacetimes globally conformal to Minkowski space. We extend his result to all two-dimensional globally hyperbolic Lorentzian spacetimes and use it to show that flat spacetime QEIs give a good approximation to the curved spacetime results on sampling timescales short in comparison with natural geometric scales. This is relevant to the application of QEIs to constrain exotic spacetime metrics.Comment: 4 pages, REVTeX. This is an expanded version of a portion of gr-qc/0409043. To appear in Phys Rev