Double flood trouble for Europe

EUROPE’S politicians should stockpile waterproof boots.  By 2050 big floods will swamp Europe twice as often as now,  and annual costs may quintuple. Climate change is partly to blame, as is construction in flood zones. A new study by Brenden Jongman of the VU University in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, is the first to include floods that affect several river basins at once. His team fed data on peak river flows into climate models. They say major floods will hit Europe every 10 years by 2050, instead of every 16 years as now. Annual losses from floods, now at €4.9 billion, will reach €23 billion by 2050 (Nature Climate Change, doi.org/rqp). Climate change accounts for onethird of the extra losses. Moon’s radio glow can help keep Islamic dates in sync IS IT Ramadan yet? Muslim communities look for the new moon to decide, and radio waves could settle the matter. The Islamic calendar is based on lunar months, with sightings of the first sliver of the waxing moon marking the start of each month. It is possible to calculate when this thin crescent will theoretically be visible, but many Muslims will only accept visual confirmation. Religious authorities in each country conduct their own lunar observations, so cloudy skies can delay the start of a new month by a day or two in some countries relative to others. This means that Muslims around the Tomboy mice have the most pups NEVER write off a rank outsider. A female mammal with a “male” chromosome should struggle to reproduce, but for female African pygmy mice, a male chromosome spells more offspring. Mus minutoides has three sex chromosomes. On top of the usual X and Y seen in other mammals, there is a modified X called X*. In 2010, Frédéric Veyrunes of the Institute of Evolutionary Sciences at the University of Montpellier in France realised the X* is  “super-feminising”: it blocks the masculinising effect of the Y chromosome. So females can be XX, XX* or X*Y. Males are all XY. Now Veyrunes has found that X*Y females reproduce more than XX or XX*. They were more likely to have a litter during a six-month spell with a male, and had larger litters (Evolution, doi.org/rpr). “This approach provides an important basis for a new way of carrying out continental-scale risk management,” says Hannah Cloke of the University of Reading, UK.