Shortly after the James Webb Space Telescope began surveying the universe in 2022, astronomers started noticing things they called little red dots. They are the furthest visible galaxies, and appear tiny and red because that is how galaxies look when they are very far away. There are loads of them and some have now been…
... read moreA link to an essay I wrote in March 2024 for the Rude Health Project. Topics touched upon are cosmological inflation, psychological coping styles, and morality. Here is an excerpt: “Society-wide we tend to see increasing levels of mental illness coincide with increasing decline in moral standards. This is because, upstream, increased levels of negative…
... read moreWith data pouring in from the recently launched James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), and combining data with other telescopes, the details are growing on how the supermassive black holes of galaxies form. The JWST is spotting great numbers of supermassive black holes at high redshifts (i.e. in the early universe). This is partly because they…
... read moreA multidisciplinary team of scientists and philosophers recently published an important article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2310223120). Entitled “On the roles of function and selection in evolving systems.” The paper is from a nine member team including scientists from the Carnegie Institution for Science, Cornell University and the California Institute of…
... read moreI recently entered the 2023 FQXI Essay Contest “How could science be different/better?” FQXI is set up to cater for the academic community, and if you are small fry like myself it generally means they don’t read past your Bio. But what the essay did allow me to do was to put together my own…
... read morePsychiatry has long been troubled by a lack of similarity to the other medical disciplines. Medical conditions usually exist as specific disorders with specific pathologies, diagnostic tests and treatments, whereas psychiatry is, in comparison, an overlapping mess. Some progress has been made through the DSM criteria and the establishment of three broad spectra of disorders….
... read moreJuly 6, 2020 Donika Mishineva is the ever-so-talented graphic designer/artist of the book cover. In this link, she tells the story of how we came to work together, and asks me a few questions about where my book is at, in 2020. https://www.artofdonika.com/post/mind-beyond-matter-book
... read moreMind Beyond Matter launched On Friday the 21st of August Mind Beyond Matter was launched at the Old Castlemaine Gaol. Invited guests listened to speeches from Dr Rowland, Dr Louisa Hope and clinical psychologist Dr Annie Thomas. A conversation between Gavin Rowland and radio host Jacqui Chaplin (65mins): http://jacquichaplin.com/bifgondemand87-90 A paper published in the Journal…
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