•    Yasmine Belkaid elected as an associate member of the Académie royale de Belgique

On January 24, a reception was held for the new associate members of the Royal Academy of Belgium, at which Yasmine Belkaid was elected as an associate member of the Science Class.

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The Académie royale des Sciences, des Lettres et des Beaux-Arts de Belgique was founded in 1772 to promote scientific and artistic research in the French Community of Belgium and to encourage initiatives in these areas to which it can lend its material and moral support.

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Watch the welcoming ceremony for new academicians on January 24, 2026

•    Núria Ros I Rocher, winner of the 2025 Zeiss image competitionClick here to access the call for applications

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Scientists, students and microscopy enthusiasts were invited to reveal the complexity and visual appeal of the invisible world by entering photomicrographs in the 2025 Zeiss image competition, which focused on the beauty and diversity of natural resources observed under the microscope. The 12 winners of this first edition included Núria Ros I Rocher, a scientist in the Evolutionary Cell Biology and Evolution of Morphogenesis Unit led by Thibaut Brunet, who won first prize with her image "Au Cœur des Origines," illustrating colonies formed through aggregation by the choanoflagellate Choanoeca flexa.

Choanoeca flexa, an aquatic microorganism that lives in pools filled by waves on the Caribbean island of Curaçao, is one of the closest single-celled relatives of animals. It can therefore serve as a key model to shed light on the evolutionary transitions that led to the emergence of multicellularity in animals.

As well as demonstrating the beauty of natural resources at microscopic scale, the aim of the competition was to illustrate the Zeiss France 2026 calendar with the 12 selected photomicrographs. Each image has been assigned to a month of the year and published in a calendar distributed to the scientific and industrial communities.
 

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See the winning entries