A massive fire tore through the main market in the city of Hargeisa in northern Somalia overnight, injuring about two dozen people and     1    (destroy) hundreds of businesses, officials have said.

Images     2    (post) on social media showed flames and huge clouds of smoke in the night sky over the city, the capital of the breakaway region of Somaliland. The cause of the blaze     3     devastated the sprawling Waheen market, the lifeblood of the city and home     4     an estimated 2,000 shops and stalls, is not yet known.

Officials said it started on Friday evening but was largely brought under control by dawn on Saturday, although some small areas were still burning.

“The town has never witnessed such a massive calamity,” Hargeisa’s mayor, Abdikarim Ahmed Mooge, told reporters at the scene. “This place was the economic centre of Hargeisa and     5     the firefighters’ best efforts made to contain the fire, the market is destroyed.” He said the blaze could have been brought under control before causing such extensive damage but that the firefighters’ attempt     6    (deny) due to access problems. The vast market is a crowded warren of shops and makeshift stalls, with no proper streets, only narrow pathways.

The Somaliland president, Muse Bihi Abdi, said during a visit to Waheen     7    about 28 people, nine of them women, were injured, but that so far no loss of life     8    (report). He said the government would be releasing one million dollars to help with the emergency response to the disaster.

Hargeisa chamber of commerce chairman Jamal Aideed said the loss of the market was immense     9     it accounted for 40% to 50% of the city’s economy.

“I have lost everything tonight, this fire was the biggest I have ever seen in my life,” said market trader Bashi Ali. “I had several businesses in the market and all of them burned to ashes.     10    we can learn from this disaster is to plan the market well,” he added.

For ages word has been going around that the dog is man’s best friend. I agree. A dog can be handy as a night watchman around the house, as a pointer on a hunting trip, as a guardian and playmate for the children. But I think that having a dog for a pet is so expensive and annoying that I can do     1     such a friend.

Providing for the dog’s needs is so expensive that the animal should be an income tax deduction. There’s the medical bill for shots to keep the animal healthy. Unless it’s kept in the house 24 hours a day, a female must be given “preventive maintenance,” a ten-to twenty-dollar investment. Otherwise,     2     you know it, you’ll have more “income tax deductions” in your family. And dogs have to eat. Don’t think you can buy a case of Ken-L-Ration and be done with it. A dog can be as particular about food as a French expert. To feed even a Chihuahua, a very small Mexican dog, you’ll spend three to five dollars     3     week. If you own a big dog, you need a large dog-house. They’re expensive. A carpenter will build a luxurious model for about seventy-five dollars. For about thirty dollars’ worth of materials, a weekend’s work, and a smashed thumb, you can build a simple one     4     . And these are only the major costs.

A dog is so annoying that no one in his right mind would want to own one.     5     (consider) the dog owner blessed with a dog that fetches slippers, rubber toys, newspapers. Have you eased your bare feet into slippers bitten by dogs, seen a living room destroyed by a toy boxer, tried to read a newspaper chewed to wet pieces by an obedient Boston bull? And dogs make noise. Some huge dogs bark all night. But you aren’t the only one     6     (endure) sleepless nights; your neighbors let you know they didn’t sleep either. Policemen are frequent visitors to dog owners’ homes. They inquire about holes     7     (report) dug in neighbors’ flower beds, prize cats injured and bleeding, and pet chickens and ducks sent to their reward. Suspect: your dog! You deny everything, of course. Rex, you assure the officers, was asleep by the door. But you secretly suspect him, because you don’t really know where Rex was all week. And you remember     8     (wonder) why feathers were floating in his water bowl yesterday. Dogs are annoying. Neither a fire-breathing mother-in-law nor a talkative wife will prove more annoying to a man than a dog.

Dog lovers will, of course, claim my argument one-sided, even exaggerated. They might consider me as cruel as the Russians,     9     possibly attempting to solve their own canine crisis — shot Fido into orbit. But the fact remains: if our     10     (good) friends caused us the expense and annoyance our dog does, we’d soon encourage them to become astronauts.

Hatching a theory

Just as dinosaurs characterized the cretaceous (白垩纪的) period, which ended with their extinction 66 million years ago, and mammals made up the Holocene (全新纪), which extends to the present day, many scientists believe we need to designate a new geologic age, called the Anthropocene,     1     reflects the impact of humankind on the planet. That raises the question: What will constitute     2     (noticeable) feature of the Anthropocene in the fossil record?

It’s likely to be chicken bones, according to a study by Carys Bennett, from the U.K.’s University of Leicester, and colleagues     3     (publish) last month in Royal Society Open Science.

Humans eat a lot of chicken, which means a lot of chicken bones are being buried, and many of them are likely to survive in fossilized form. According to Bennett’s paper, 65.8 billion chickens were killed globally in 2016, and     4     22.7 billion live birds await this fate today. The “biomass” of all poultry is 10 times greater than of all wild birds     5     (put) together.

We’re not just eating a lot of poultry; we’ve also put our mark on the birds themselves.     6     chicken consumption started taking off in the 1950s, the size and shape of the species—their skeleton, bone chemistry and genetics—have changed completely from their wild ancestors. The rapid growth of chicken’s leg and breast muscle means that its organs, including the heart and liver, are proportionally smaller. We     7     (shorten) the life span of broiler chickens, which can no longer survive without “intensive human intervention,” the authors write.

Because we engineered the species, and because it has become such a major feature of food consumption, it will     8     (consider) a marker of the Anthropocene, Bennett predicts. “The significance of the post-mid-20^th-century chicken is that it is the first really good example we have     9     what paleontologists (古生物学家) call a new “morphospecies”—that is, a distinctive kind of skeleton that    10     be identified as a fossil—that appeared in the Anthropocene and became hugely abundant pretty well around the world,” she says. “In the future, humans will find and use chickens as a marker of our age.”

Using renewables seems to cut carbon more than nuclear. Nations that embraced renewable forms of energy have significantly cut their carbon emissions, but     1     pursuing nuclear power have failed to do so, researchers have found.

Nuclear and renewables are seen as two key ways for governments to decarbonize(去碳), but the question of   whether one is more effective for dealing with climate change     2     (not address) fully. With several countries on the brink of deciding whether    3     (back) new nuclear power plants to meet their carbon targets, the answer to this question matters

To find out, Benjamin Sovacool at the University of Sussex and his colleagues looked at carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and GDP over 25 years. They found that in 117 countries that had been using renewables, CO2 emissions per capita(人均地)dropped from 0.69 tonnes(公吨)on average between 1990 and 2004 to 0.61 tonnes between 2000 and 2014 and     4     these latter figures included a further six countries.

During the same periods, however, the 30 countries that had been using nuclear power largely stayed flat, shifting from an average 0.52 tonnes of Co2 emissions per capita to 0.51. The two groups of countries overlap because some fall into both. Renewables included wind, solar, hydroelectric, and biomass energy. “If you’re focusing on    5     we can do to reduce emissions in the next 15 years,     6     (pursue) renewables instead of nuclear,” says Sovacool.

The reason    7     the results is not clear — the analysis found a connection, not a causation—but Sovacool has ideas. Nuclear power is restricted due to agreements     8     (limit) the spread of nuclear weapons     9     material from reactors (核反应堆) can be used to make bombs. Renewables are not, enabling more countries to learn from one another, such as Germany benefiting from Chinese economies of scale on solar. Other reasons for this    10     be that renewables are cheaper and quicker to build and more socially acceptable, says Sovacool.

What Lies Beneath

“EARTH” has always been an odd choice of name for the third planet from the Sun. After all, an alien examining it     1     a telescope would note that two thirds of its surface is covered not by earth at all, but by oceans of water.

Marine biologists think the oceans might host more than 2m species of marine animals, of which they     2     (record) perhaps only a tenth so far. A new initiative hopes to change this.     3     (launch) in London on April 27th, Ocean Census aims to discover 100,000 new species of marine animal over the coming decade.

The initiative is happening now for two reasons. One is that, the longer scientists wait, the less there will be to catalogue. Climate change is heating the oceans, as well as making them more acidic. One of Ocean Census’s priorities will be cataloguing species thought to be in     4     (great) danger from climate change. Otherwise, the risk is of the forest burning down and not knowing     5     was there before it was lost.

The second reason is technological. Marine biologists find about 2,000 new species a year, a rate hardly changed since Darwin’s day. Ocean Census is betting that it     6     go faster. “Cyber taxonomy”, for instance, involves     7     (feed) DNA sequences from animals into computers,     8     can quickly decide whether it is a new species. The ability to describe new creatures, as well as simply cataloguing them, has also improved. Fancy cameras on remote-operated vehicles, for instance,     9     (allow) scientists to make laser scans of deep-sea creatures such as jellyfish without removing them from their habitat. Just as the immense pressures of the deep sea are fatal for humans, so taking such a jellyfish to the surface for examination is a dangerous move     10     it may be reduced to gooey slime (粘稠的黏液).