The Review 2015

35 What Is Freedom? Seeding the Future – Innovation An innovative new Common Core Course is challenging students to look at freedom from different points of view and in different contexts, including architecture, politics, economics, housing, public space, the arts and fashion. The course, titled ‘ Freedom: Spirits, Experiences and Expressions’, was launched in September 2015 and requires students to go into their environment and consider concepts of freedom around them. For example, in one task they walk around campus to explore their freedom of movement and why they can enter some spaces but not others. Students also have to complete individual projects in the community focused on a particular aspect of freedom. Saripalli Varun Vamsi (above), a first-year Engineering student from India, has been looking at gentrification in Wan Chai and how it impinges on the freedom of residents with low incomes to continue living where they have always lived. “I took this course to get different perspectives on freedom. Before, I thought it was about the ability to do what you want. Now I can see that there is positive and negative freedom and that freedom can mean one thing to me and something else to another person,” he said. Dr Liz Jackson of the Faculty of Education, who leads the course, said she was inspired by the different concepts of freedom she encountered as a student – including a statement by US President George W Bush that Iraqis wanted freedom and terrorists hated freedom. “It became obvious to me that what was meant by ‘freedom’ changed depending on where you were in the world,” she said. Dr Jackson said planning for the course started in 2013, but it had been revised to include some content about the Umbrella Movement. “Though it is a controversial topic today around campus, I am glad to play a constructive role in helping our students to find intellectual resources as they become engaged in various social and political activities,” she said. Beaming up the Past A new technique that uses laser beams to reveal previously-hidden details of fossils and examine fossils in hard-to-reach places has been developed by an international team of scientists including Dr Michael Pittman (pictured with lab members Dr Pei Rui and Ms Fion Ma) in the Department of Earth Sciences. The laser-st imulated f luorescence (LSF) technique causes fossi ls t o f l uoresce so prese r ved t i ssues and other detai l s can be seen that are not visible under standard UV lighting. In one example, the scientists discovered tiny barbules in fossilised feathers that had not been seen before, enabling better compa r i sons t o be made between primitive and modern feathers. LSF is also able to detect fossils buried under thin layers of rock matrix, examine fossils in the field that cannot be moved, speed up the sorting of micro-fossils from gravel, and even identify possible fake fossils. And it is cheap and easy to set up, costing around $4,000 for a basic station. “LSF promises to become an important mainstream paleontological technique, particularly during fossil preparation and when describing the anatomy of fossilised organisms, so the team and I really hope that it fulfils its billing and helps to drive the field forward,” Dr Pittman said. The technique was reported in the open-access journal PLOS ONE in May 2015, just two months after Dr Pittman was involved in the publication of the discovery of Hong Kong’s first Jurassic-era vertebrate. He was supervisor to undergraduate student, Edison Tse Tze-kei, who led the description of a Paralycoptera fish fossil from Sai Kung, which they reported in another open-access journal, PeerJ , in March. The fossil dates back about 147 million years. The Review 2015