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Climate Change: The World’s Other Crisis

Although COVID-19 has understandably captured the world’s full attention this year, the dangers of climate change have not gone away. HKU scholars are applying scientific and legal expertise to assess the ecological and political dimensions of the problem, and the possible solutions. HKU also recently joined the International Universities Climate Alliance, a platform for researchers to exchange information on climate change and join forces in formulating solutions.

Carbon Sinks Losing Ground

Tropical forests and mangroves play an important role in absorbing greenhouse gas emissions, but rising temperatures are putting them at high risk of dying off.

Mysteries of the Deep

Abrupt sea-level events caused by ice sheets melting are crucial to our understanding of Earth’s climate system and how it is influenced by glacial conditions. A new discovery that eustatic sea-level rises can be discontinuous and sudden, has big implications, especially for low-elevation cities like Hong Kong.

The Sovereign State Feels the Heat

However you look at it, the modern state is ill-equipped to deal with the challenges of climate change.

Power Plays

Renewable energy should be a solution for reducing our impact on the climate. But politics and market considerations are complicating its development and spread.

Airborne Solution

Research by Dr Nam Kyung-Min shows air pollution and climate change policies work best if they go hand in hand.

Reasons to Feel Less Helpless

HKU researchers have identified areas where local actions may alleviate some of the impact on marine life and shorelines that is typically associated with global climate change.

COVID-19: Tracking the Pandemic

Rigorous research is the key to understanding COVID-19 and getting its spread under control. Scholars in the Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine (HKUMed) are at the forefront of this research and have rightly received attention from around the world for their significant findings. But scholars in other disciplines have also applied their expertise to reveal new characteristics about the pandemic...

Mind the Gap

A five-year research study on learning and assessment of digital citizenship in Hong Kong has shown a wide gap in competence levels across and even within schools. It is also proving prescient, given the arrival of COVID-19 and the sudden necessity for widespread learning online, and this has sparked a new study on how schools are coping.

Easy Warning System

New scale gives quick warning of the likelihood of relapse in schizophrenic patients.

Facial Recognition: The Next Phase

Dr Ping Luo helped develop a facial recognition system that has outperformed competitors from Google and Facebook and that he is taking to the next step by applying it to social relationships and fashion.

Sex among the Masses

Professor Wu Cuncun has been digging out lesser-known songbooks and storybooks from Imperial China that offer a window into the sex and material lives of the lower classes.

City Squeeze

China’s accelerating urban redevelopment has encouraged local governments to let landowners share in the profits, but it has also exacerbated inequalities.

Drawing Rhythm from the Algorithm

Dr Hu Xiao of the Faculty of Education has used data analytics to develop systems that can retrieve and recommend music for modulating people’s emotions and evoking behavioural and physiological responses.

Feeling Bored? Pay Attention to This

Boredom tends to arise when we stop paying attention to the task at hand, say HKU psychology researchers. The easy distraction of the smartphone is not helping.

Towing the Line

An iconic boundary line drawn up in 1800s by a Victorian biologist to explain how and why land animals were distributed across the planet has been redrawn following a study of Christmas Island in the eastern Indian Ocean.