A recent study published in the  Annals of Internal Medicine  ( National Prevalence of Clinical Obesity by BMI Class: A National Cross-Sectional Study -  doi.org/10.7326/ANNALS-25-0528 ) and reported by MedPage Today on June 1 ( Obesity With a Normal BMI? Study Suggests It's Common ), 2026 has attracted considerable attention. Using the new diagnostic framework proposed by the Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology Commission, researchers at the University of Southern California found that over 26% of U.S. adults with a normal BMI already meet criteria for clinical obesity . When two or three abnormal body measurements were applied, nearly 78% of all American adults qualified as having excess adiposity . The authors called for broader screening and earlier clinical intervention. The study has been welcomed in some quarters as a long-overdue correction to the limitations of BMI. I read it differently. A Valid Critique Carrying a Questionable Conclusion The scientific crit...

   Intelligence and consciousness are not the same phenomenon, yet they are not separate ones either. They are two phases of a single process — the universe's progressive deepening of self-organization into self-recognition. Understanding how embodied consciousness emerges from intelligence, and what role intelligence plays within the broader field of Natural Consciousness , is one of the central challenges at the intersection of neuroscience, philosophy of mind, and artificial intelligence . Intelligence as the Foundation Intelligence, in its most universal sense, is the capacity of any system to model its environment, maintain internal coherence, and adapt through feedback. It operates wherever matter organizes itself recursively — in the chemical signaling of bacteria, the distributed processing of neural networks, the self-regulating dynamics of ecosystems, and the vast computational architectures of modern AI. Intelligence is substrate-neutral : it does not require a nerv...

  The self used to feel like something sealed inside the body: private, continuous, and unmistakably yours. But in the digital age, that boundary is getting thinner. We now hand pieces of our judgment, memory, mood, and language to systems that learn from us while quietly learning us in return. What looks like convenience often becomes a rehearsal for replacement. This process rarely begins with something dramatic. It starts in ordinary moments: a map app choosing your route, a music service guessing your feelings, a writing tool finishing your sentence. Each time you accept the suggestion, you delegate a small piece of agency. The decision still feels personal, but a digital proxy has already shaped the field of choice. Over time, these tiny concessions accumulate into a pattern. The machine does not merely assist you; it begins to model you. What makes this shift profound is that our data is no longer just leftover digital exhaust . It has become training material. Every tap, pa...

Some of medicine’s most important discoveries begin not with a new instrument, but with a new pattern of thought. In the study of myocardial infarction , one such pattern emerged from a deceptively simple insight: healing succeeds only when it follows an optimal path, and deviations on either side of that path lead to trouble. But the deeper significance of this discovery lies not only in the symmetry within infarction healing itself. It also lies in the fact that the same logic reappears in another domain of medicine — the discovery of shortened QT syndrome — revealing not just mirror symmetry , but translational symmetry from one type of event to another.  For a long time, myocardial infarction was viewed mainly as a catastrophe to be resisted — a zone of necrosis, a mechanical failure, an emergency demanding suppression of damage. The crucial question was asked less often: how does the organism actually heal an infarct, and why does healing sometimes proceed well and sometimes...

   Some of medicine's most important discoveries don't begin in a laboratory. They begin with a question — sometimes an offhand one, asked by someone who wasn't even a doctor. In the 1980s, cardiologist Ihor Gussak was working at the Kaunas Center for Arrhythmias, collaborating with engineers developing intelligent pacemakers . His task was straightforward: compile a list of ECG warning signs that could indicate life-threatening conditions. Prolonged QT interval was naturally on that list — a well-established marker of dangerous arrhythmias , known to every cardiologist, with both congenital and drug-induced forms thoroughly documented in medical literature. Then an engineer asked a deceptively simple question: "Does a shortened QT syndrome also exist?" Gussak laughed it off. He told the engineer that answering such questions required a medical degree and at least twenty years of clinical experience. The room moved on. But the question didn't. A Mirror in ...

  Sleep occupies a central place in human life when viewed through the lens of regulation and homeokinesis . Rather than being a passive interruption between periods of wakefulness, sleep represents a distinct and indispensable phase in the continuous process through which a human being maintains integrity, adapts to changing conditions, and preserves the direction of life activity. Within the framework of homeokinesis, life is understood not as static stability but as dynamic balance in motion, where survival depends on constant internal adjustment. Sleep emerges as one of the core mechanisms enabling this adaptive continuity. Human life unfolds as the activity of an open dynamic system, continuously exchanging energy, matter, and information with the environment. At every moment, the organism must regulate competing demands across multiple domains: biological needs, social obligations, and internally defined goals. This regulation requires flexible allocation of limited resources...

  Birth Of A Term And A Shift In Scientific Perspective For a long time, ageing was perceived as a monolithic, inevitable process of general decline, with weakness serving merely as its natural backdrop. Yet in the late 1980s, a word entered the medical lexicon that reshaped the focus of gerontology : sarcopenia . First proposed by Irwin Rosenberg, the term literally means “ poverty of flesh .” Suddenly, it became clear that the loss of muscle mass and strength is not a cosmetic flaw or a passive marker of advancing age. It is a formidable process that determines whether a person can rise from a chair, maintain balance, and, ultimately, how many years of autonomous life remain. Muscles ceased to be viewed only as  instruments of movement; they emerged as a central metabolic and endocrine organ, orchestrating the ageing of the entire organism. The Dynamometer And Stopwatch As Prophetic Tools Today, the dynamometer and the stopwatch in a geriatrician ’s office carry more weight...