Merry Christmas to you all! As a nerdy Christmas card I had Google Gemini Canvas code a Christmas-themed Galton board, to entertain my stats students (it is 1000 lines of JavaScript code)! :-) gemini.google.com/share/15f33a...

Merry Christmas to you all! As a nerdy Christmas card I had Google Gemini Canvas code a Christmas-themed Galton board, to entertain my stats students (it is 1000 lines of JavaScript code)! :-) gemini.google.com/share/15f33a...

A young PI here in Mainz has a fabulous PhD position that will be filled soon! By you? Keywords: Social insects, ageing, gene expression. www.blogs.uni-mainz.de/fb10-evoluti...

The @iussi-nwes.bsky.social that we organised this week in Leuven (18-19 December, www.iussi-nweurope.org/meetings) was a success! @rmash.bsky.social and @patrick-kennedy.bsky.social delivered fantastic keynote talks and there was a great set of contributed talks and posters.

🚨 Tenure-track professorship at Goethe University of Frankfurt, Germany, with a focus on evolutionary ecology of social hymenoptera 🐝🐜 Initially for 6 years: www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/pr...

Talk I gave about our recent Evolution Letters paper, in which we quantified the benefits of helping at the origin of eusociality using a combination of experiment & theory, at the @iussi-nwes.bsky.social winter meeting in Leuven this week! Powerpoint here: www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/4w3hw...

POSTDOC ALERT🚨 Two exciting social evolution postdoc positions live today! We're looking for two excellent field biologists. Join us to explore the evolution of sociality in wasps across Africa. Apply by 11th January. Collaboration with @dustinrubenstein.com @bristolbiosci.bsky.social

@patrick-kennedy.bsky.social talks about so many fun social evolution dramas at @iussi-nwes.bsky.social winter meeting #wasplove

@rmash.bsky.social from @ucl.ac.uk opening @iussi-nwes.bsky.social winter meeting in Leuven! #CareAsACapacitor

Elegant experiment-theory mix, showing increasing returns from helping in a cooperative wasp

Early-season helping in Polistes wasps shows increasing returns - more helpers lead to convex gains in sexual productivity, resolving a key paradox in the origins of eusociality. academic.oup.com/evlett/artic... @ricaliari.bsky.social @twenseleers.bsky.social

Super handy! Upload your photo in Chatgpt and write "Use /Photoshop to remove XXX from background" and you get a .png back in original resolution. Works really well!

Happy to see yet another article from our lab come out: "Deformed wing virus affects foraging success and foraging specialization of honeybee workers"! Check it out! Congrats to my coauthors @HelenaMFerreir2 Kristof Benaets Lina De Smet & Dirk de Graaf www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🚨 New paper out in @jexpbiol.bsky.social by Mattens et al @cintiaoi.bsky.social @twenseleers.bsky.social on "Age-related differences in learning, #memory and #brain #plasticity in workers of the common #wasp Vespula vulgaris" 🧠🐝 ↘️ doi.org/10.1242/jeb.... ↙️

Open postdoc position in Theoretical Evolutionary Biology at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, focusing on mathematical models of social traits. Details: https://tinyurl.com/37uhtbne #postdoc

Harmony in the hive? Think again! 🐝⚔️ Insect societies are famous for cooperation, but beneath the surface lies a brutal conflict over who gets to wear the crown! Our new review in Biological Reviews explores the evolutionary battleground caused by such caste fate conflict. 🧵

Harmony in the hive? Think again! 🐝⚔️ Insect societies are famous for cooperation, but beneath the surface lies a brutal conflict over who gets to wear the crown! Our new review in Biological Reviews explores the evolutionary battleground caused by such caste fate conflict. 🧵

Still 2 weeks left to register for our Winter Meeting 2025 in Leuven 🇧🇪! Register here: www.iussi-nweurope.org/meetings Date: 18-19 Dec Host: Laboratory of Socioecology and Social Evolution @KU Leuven (@twenseleers.bsky.social) We have an exciting programme, incl. Ido Pen & @rmash.bsky.social

Independently evolved supergenes control colony social organization and queen reproductive strategies in several ant lineages. Sigeman et al. uncover a novel 9 Mb supergene controlling queen size and social organization in Myrmica ruginodis. 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msaf255 #evobio #molbio #ants

In our new study we were the first to experimentally simulate the origin of sociality! By controlling how many wasp 🐝daughters could help their mom, we found that early helpers don't just add to colony success—they multiply it!

Deadline to submit an abstract for our IUSSI winter meeting in Leuven, 18-19 December is fast approaching! Please come and join us & submit your abstract before the 31st of October! Will be great fun & excellent lineup of speakers, with plenaries by Ido Pen & @rmash.bsky.social!

🚨 Deadline to submit an abstract for our IUSSI winter meeting in beautiful Leuven, 18-19 December has been extended to 31st October 2025 🚨 Please register at: www.iussi-nweurope.org/meetings Come and join us - will be great fun & great lineup of speakers! Plenaries by Ido Pen & @rmash.bsky.social

🚨 Deadline to submit an abstract for our IUSSI winter meeting in beautiful Leuven, 18-19 December has been extended to 31st October 2025 🚨 Please register at: www.iussi-nweurope.org/meetings Come and join us - will be great fun & great lineup of speakers! Plenaries by Ido Pen & @rmash.bsky.social

Very happy to see our new study on the evolution of eusociality come out in Evolution Letters! Our study is the first to experimentally manipulate the proportion of females that stay and help to simulate incipient sociality & assess fitness impact of helping. 🧵

Very happy to see our new study on the evolution of eusociality come out in Evolution Letters! Our study is the first to experimentally manipulate the proportion of females that stay and help to simulate incipient sociality & assess fitness impact of helping. 🧵

We are delighted that our Winter Meeting 2025 in Leuven 🇧🇪 is approaching! Abstract submissions now open: www.iussi-nweurope.org/meetings Date: December 18-19 Abstract deadline: October 15 Host: Laboratory of Socioecology and Social Evolution at KU Leuven Plenary: Ido Pen & @rmash.bsky.social

Free PDF of a highly recommended book: "High-Dimensional Regression Modeling" (2024) by Patrick Breheny and Jian Huang. myweb.uiowa.edu/pbreheny/7240/s25/book.pdf with reproducible R code at github.com/pbreheny/hdrm. Accompanying lecture notes & R scripts here: myweb.uiowa.edu/pbreheny/724....

📌North-West European IUSSI Winter Meeting 2025 We are happy to announce that our next meeting on the 18–19 December 2025 will be in Leuven, Belgium, hosted by @twenseleers.bsky.social and his team. Plenary speakers: Ido Pen & Rahia Mashoodh @rmash.bsky.social More details to follow 🐝🐜🪳🪲

Honoured to see an article about my research on extra-pair paternity in @science.org. Many thanks to journalist @spoke32.bsky.social for the story and to all colleagues for their quotes! Hopefully, future visitors to my office will be less surprised by a (reproduction) 17th-century painting...

Cool new article out in Nature Communications by @hensniel.bsky.social and colleagues: "Assessing the role of children in the COVID-19 pandemic in Belgium using perturbation analysis". www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Happy New Year to you all! My Christmas holidays involved helping my son make a DNA molecule model using a 3D pen & getting a new pet for him: leaf insects! Great fun!

In first grade we just demonstrated a Makeblock robot with a mobile phone mounted on its back with ChatGPT Advanced Voice Mode, to pretend the robot was able to talk! The kids & teacher absolutely loved it! It answered all the kids' questions for a full hour! It could even talk with a robot voice!

Now that ChatGPT o1 actually supports image upload I thought I would give it that Mensa Norway IQ test once more, test.mensa.no/Home/Test/en, but out of the 35 puzzles it only manages to solve 20 within the given 25 min time limit & then ends with an IQ below 100. :-(

A new platform, a new thread. Here's a thread explaining our recent work on #evolution in finite populations, now available ahead of print in @asn-amnat.bsky.social 🧬🧪

Do you want to #model quantitative trait #evolution? Do you like #SPDEs? Happy to say my first solo author paper, now out in Theoretical Population Biology, is about just this! Check it out here: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... I'm super proud of this y'all :') #scisky 🧪 🧬 #mathsky #physics

The lecture material of my latest data visualisation class in R, using both base R & ggplot, which was part of our Advanced Biological Data Analysis course here : www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/0via9... #rstats

Nice perspectives article about our earlier Current Biology study on the inheritance of alternative nest architectures in stingless bees led by my postdoc Viviana Di Pietro: link.springer.com/article/10.3... Original article here: www.researchgate.net/publication/...

Last Sunday, we had a blast at Day of Science! Truly amazing to see kids (and parents) having fun with Biology. We made bee hotels, gave some info and got them acquainted with some common social insect species in Belgium. @kuleuven.bsky.social @twenseleers.bsky.social

Ruben's self balancing robot just about made it to the finish line. Great fun those Makeblock robots! :-)