The pandemic exposes human nature: 10 evolutionary insights.

Humans and viruses have been coevolving for millennia. Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19) has been particularly successful in evading our evolved defenses. The outcome has been tragic-across the globe, millions have been sickened and hundreds of thousands have died. Moreover, the quarantine has radically changed the structure of our lives, with devastating social and economic consequences that are likely to unfold for years. An evolutionary perspective can help us understand the progression and consequences of the pandemic. Here, a diverse group of scientists, with expertise from evolutionary medicine to cultural evolution, provide insights about the pandemic and its aftermath. At the most granular level, we consider how viruses might affect social behavior, and how quarantine, ironically, could make us susceptible to other maladies, due to a lack of microbial exposure. At the psychological level, we describe the ways in which the pandemic can affect mating behavior, cooperation (or the lack thereof), and gender norms, and how we can use disgust to better activate native "behavioral immunity" to combat disease spread. At the cultural level, we describe shifting cultural norms and how we might harness them to better combat disease and the negative social consequences of the pandemic. These insights can be used to craft solutions to problems produced by the pandemic and to lay the groundwork for a scientific agenda to capture and understand what has become, in effect, a worldwide social experiment.

Impacts of Psychopharmaceuticals on the Neurodevelopment of Aquatic Wildlife: A Call for Increased Knowledge Exchange across Disciplines to Highlight Implications for Human Health.

The global use of psychopharmaceuticals such as antidepressants has been steadily increasing. However, the environmental consequences of increased use are rarely considered by medical professionals. Worldwide monitoring efforts have shown that pharmaceuticals are amongst the multitude of anthropogenic pollutants found in our waterways, where excretion via urine and feces is thought to be the primary mode of pharmaceutical contamination. Despite the lack of clarity surrounding the effects of the unintentional exposure to these chemicals, most notably in babies and in developing fetuses, the US Environmental Protection Agency does not currently regulate any psychopharmaceuticals in drinking water. As the underlying reasons for the increased incidence of mental illness-particularly in young children and adolescents-are poorly understood, the potential effects of unintentional exposure warrant more attention. Thus, although links between environmental contamination and physiological and behavioral changes in wildlife species-most notably in fish-have been used by ecologists and wildlife biologists to drive conservation policy and management practices, we hypothesize that this knowledge may be underutilized by medical professionals. In order to test this hypothesis, we created a hierarchically-organized citation network built around a highly-cited "parent" article to explore connections between aquatic toxicology and medical fields related to neurodevelopment. As suspected, we observed that studies in medical fields such as developmental neuroscience, obstetrics and gynecology, pediatrics, and psychiatry cite very few to no papers in the aquatic sciences. Our results underscore the need for increased transdisciplinary communication and information exchange between the aquatic sciences and medical fields.

Lipid abnormalities in insulin resistant states.

There are many metabolic consequences of insulin resistance and multiple conditions associated with insulin resistant states. The most obvious pathology associated with insulin resistance is type 2 diabetes mellitus, but other manifestations include hypertension, central obesity, a hypercoagulable state, and dyslipidemia. The atherogenic dyslipidemia associated with insulin resistant states is characterized by hypertriglyceridemia; an increase in very-low-density lipoprotein secretion from the liver; an increase in atherogenic small, dense low-density lipoprotein; and a decrease in high-density lipoprotein cholesterol. Each of these lipid abnormalities is an independent risk factor for coronary artery disease, and in concert, the cardiovascular risk is magnified. Therefore, insulin resistant states should be identified as early as possible in patients, and these lipid abnormalities should be assessed and treated.