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! :-)