Given a paragraph, generate a claim that is supported by the given paragraph. 1) The claim must contain information from within the paragraph. 2) A sentence within the paragraph can be used as a claim. 3) The claim should not have contradictions within the paragraph. 4) The claim should be at most one sentence long.

Input: Consider Input: Studying the DNA of two distant bat species, the scientists discovered how genes dealing with the bats’ immune system had undergone the most rapid change. This may explain why they are relatively free of disease and live exceptionally long lives compared with other mammals of similar size, such as the rat, said Professor Lin-Fa Wang, an infectious disease expert at the Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School in Singapore who led the multi-centre study. “We are not saying bats never get sick or never get infections. What we are saying is they handle infections a lot better,” Wang said in a telephone interview. What was missing from both species of bats was a gene segment known to trigger extreme, and potentially fatal, immune reactions to infections, called the cytokine storm. Cytokine storms end up killing not only offending viruses in the body, but the host’s own cells and tissues too. “Viruses rarely kill the host. The killing comes from the host’s immune response. So it looks like what bats are doing is depress the inflammation (cytokine storm). If we can learn that, we can design drugs to minimize the inflammation damage and control viral infection,” Wang said. The study, which saw the participation of researchers from China, Denmark, Australia and the United States, was published on Friday in the journal Science. Compared with other mammals of similar size, bats live a long time, with lifespans of between 20 and 40 years. Rats live between 2 and 3 years, on average. Interestingly, Wang and his colleagues found that the highly evolved genes that give bats their superior immune system also enable them to fly. Out of more than 5,000 types of mammals on the planet, bats are the only one capable of sustained flight and some species can fly more than 1,000 km in a single night. Such intense physical exertion is known to produce toxic “free radicals” that cause tissue damage and it is these same genes that give the bat the ability to repair itself, Wang said. “What we found was the genes that evolved fastest were genes involved in repairing DNA damage. That makes sense ... because when you fly, metabolism goes up and it generates free radicals that are toxic to cells,” Wang said. “Because bats fly, they (would have had) to evolve and adapt ... to get genes that can repair DNA damage.”  Wang said we have much to learn from the bat, which has evolved to avoid disease and live exceptionally long lives. “Cancer, ageing and infectious disease, these are the three major areas of concern for people,” he said. “We have studied rats for 150 years to understand how to do better in these three areas. Now we have a system, the bat, that has done very well in evolution. We can learn from the bat. With modern techniques, we can design new drugs to slow down the ageing process, treat cancer, fight infections.”

Output: Long-lived bats offer clues on diseases, aging.


Input: Consider Input: Researchers set out to determine what killed coral near the $205 million dredge work at the port, which was done to make way for the larger ships sailing through an expanded Panama Canal to bring cargo to South Florida. Their study, published this month in the online journal PeerJ, compared work done in the channel to nearby coral. It puts at odds two governmental agencies that clashed over the dredge. Environmentalists had long worried that that $205 million dredging would damage the coral. The Miami Herald (http://hrld.us/2gFJYNi ) reports the Corps contended a disease outbreak was responsible. State environmental regulators argued that mud stirred up by the dredge or leaked by a barge as it ferried sediment offshore smothered coral. The research team studied pictures taken before, during and after the dredge and said sediment spread across an area about 14 times bigger than the Corps permit allowed for. The study found that warm temperatures in the summer of 2014 triggered widespread bleaching and disease and the coral — stressed by the sediment — died in larger numbers than nearby coral. The project deepened the port’s channel by 6 feet, making it 52-feet deep. It completes a $1 billion makeover that includes a new tunnel at the port. “We now know the Corps dramatically underestimated both the severity and the geographic extent of the sediment impacts on the reef,” said Miami Waterkeeper Rachel Silverstein, whose group joined other conservationists in a legal fight to clean up the dredge. “The monitoring and the protocols that were supposed to protect this reef during the dredge clearly failed and this study is providing peer-reviewed, statistically valid evidence showing that impacts from the dredging resulted in widespread impacts.” Beginning in the summer of 2015, the fisheries service repeatedly warned the Corps that damage appeared to be more widespread and the agency was in danger of violating its permit. The Herald reports that the Corps also failed to provide updated surveys of the work, which prompted the fisheries service to issue a sharp letter accusing the agency of selectively choosing “certain results to downplay the permanent effects” of the dredge. Corps officials said the study used limited data and failed to distinguish between the types of sediment that buried coral during the dredge. “Drawing broad scale conclusions based on limited data is very misleading and not good science,” Corps spokeswoman Susan Jackson told the Herald via email. She said the agency is “committed to understanding potential impacts” and has expanded monitoring efforts, which include cameras on the ocean floor to record conditions. The researchers conclude that the study highlights the need to be more careful when dredging near sensitive reefs and should serve as a warning for the upcoming $374 million expansion at Port Everglades in Fort Lauderdale. ___ Information from: The Miami Herald, http://www.herald.com

Output: Study: Mud stirred up during PortMiami dredge killed coral.


Input: Consider Input: The California deaths were caused by a strain of the influenza virus that is sending sufferers across the nation to the doctor for flu-like symptoms at rates that are 50 percent higher than normal, said Lyn Finelli, head of the influenza surveillance and outbreak response team at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “That’s way above the norm for flu,” Finelli said. “It tells us we’re still in the middle of flu season, and in the Northeast and California it’s going up, up, up.”  The flu strain responsible for the California deaths, H1N1, also predominates nationwide this year. It hits people hardest between the ages of 25 and 64, partly because some older people are believed to have more immunity due to similar outbreaks many decades ago. In California, 52 people died last week alone, including one child, the state’s chief of communicable disease control told reporters on a conference call Friday. “This influenza season continues to be a severe one as the increasing number of influenza-related deaths indicates,” Ron Chapman, director of the California Department of Public Health, said in a statement, urging Californians to get vaccinated. In addition to the 147 confirmed California flu-related fatalities this season among people under age 65, another 44 suspected flu deaths remain under investigation, said Dr. James Watt, chief of the state’s Division of Communicable Disease Control. Most of those felled by the disease had other health conditions, but not all, he said. Last year at the same time, the state had recorded just 14 flu deaths among Californians under age 65. The death of a 47-year-old television advertising executive in the state’s capital city prompted a renewed call for residents to become vaccinated against flu. Sacramento County, with 21 deaths so far, leads the state in fatalities. “After reading the heartbreaking story of Nancy Pinnella, went to CVS and got my first flu shot ever,” California’s first lady, Anne Gust Brown, posted on Twitter. It is not fully clear whether California is an outlier in the severity of its cases, because states are not required to report flu deaths to the CDC, and data is collected differently from state to state and county to county, said CDC spokesman Jason McDonald. The fatality data that the public health agency does collect, on pediatric deaths, is not useful in studying H1N1, because the virus is more likely to attack adults, Finelli said. The public health agency does, however collect information on why people go to the doctor, and whether they are hospitalized for flu. Those signs, she said, show that this year’s flu is likely to continue to hit hard. Although the number of cases nationwide appears to have plateaued, she said, that does not take into account that California and the Northeast are lagging other areas with a late flu season. Meanwhile, CDC data does show that far more people under the age of 65 are being hospitalized with flu-like symptoms than last year. As of last week, for example, 76 percent of those hospitalized for flu were under age 65, compared to less than 50 percent last year. Nationwide, the data shows that somewhat fewer people have contracted flu so far this year than last year, Finelli said. This year’s strain, however, appears to be causing severe illness in a population that is more typically robust, she said.


Output: California sees high rate of flu deaths in unusually severe season.