Two Remarks on Blocking Sets and Nuclei in Planes of Prime Order

In this paper we characterize a sporadic non-Rédei Type blocking set of PG(2,7) having minimum cardinality, and derive an upper bound for the number of nuclei of sets in PG(2,q) having less than q+1 points. Our methods involve polynomials over finite fields, and work mainly for planes of prime order.