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.

Scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration expect this year’s bloom to rank among the top five since it began measuring their severity in 2002, according to their annual algae forecast for the lake. What’s not known is how toxic it might be or whether it will pose a threat for cities in Ohio and Michigan that draw their drinking water from the lake. Algae blooms that produce toxins and can sicken swimmers and harm fish are becoming an increasing concern nationwide, causing water warnings this year from Vermont to the Gulf Coast. Environmental officials in New Jersey have been telling people to stay out of the state’s largest lake since late June and beaches in Mississippi have been closed in recent weeks by a bloom fueled by polluted Midwest floodwaters pouring from the Mississippi River. Lake Erie, the shallowest and warmest of the Great Lakes, has been hit particularly hard over the past decade. It was five years ago when a toxic bloom caused a two-day shutdown of drinking water in Toledo. Researchers, using a scale for rating the severity of the bloom, expect it to be a 7.5 this year — short of the most severe outbreaks this past decade but still a significant one. Studies have shown that much of the phosphorus that fuels the algae comes from fertilizer runoff from farm fields along with sewage treatment plants and other sources. Unusually heavy rains this spring washed large amounts of nutrients into the lake, but the rain also prevented many farmers from planting corn and applying phosphorus-rich fertilizers on their fields. That may be why the amount of phosphorus found in the lake’s largest tributary, the Maumee River, was much lower than what would be expected, said Laura Johnson, director of the National Center for Water Quality Research at Heidelberg University. The forecasters say one thing they’re unsure about is how the record-setting water levels on the lake this year will impact the algae. “Each bloom is different in how they behave,” said Rick Stumpf, of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Where the bloom will go on the lake’s western end along Ohio and Michigan will vary based on wind direction, but researchers point out that most of the lake will be fine for boaters and swimmers. Other factors that will determine the size and location of this year’s bloom in the coming weeks include rain amounts and the lake’s water temperature. Although some areas along the Ohio shoreline already have algae starting to form and drift into the lake, researchers don’t expect to see a large outbreak until the end of July.
Expect another huge blob of algae on Lake Erie this summer.

The story describes the cost of the drug-coated stents compared to the older version, the bare metal stents. The story does report the risk of clotting with the drug-coated stents, however the comparison of coated and bare metal stents is the key piece of information that is missing in this story. This information should also be presented in absolute rather than relative terms. The story adequately describes the risk of clotting with drug-coated stents and of bleeding with Plavix. The story does a good job of describing the strength of the available evidence, particularly the limitations of using hospital registries as a source of data. By accurately describing the prevalence of restenosis, or narrowing of the artery after stenting, the story avoids disease mongering. The story quotes multiple experts who have differing perspectives on how the new information changes clinical practice. The story does mention alternatives such as bare metal stents, bypass surgery and medications. The story clearly states that drug-coated stents are common. The story clearly states that the drug-coated stents are new but have been widely used since they were introduced. Because the story quotes multiple independent sources the reader can assume that the story does not rely on a press release as the sole source of information.
FDA Probes Safety of Popular Heart Stent

It’s widely known that languages evolve as societies develop and change, but the sounds we utter are also shaped, literally, by the placement of our jaw — and that is influenced by how we chew our food, researchers report Thursday in the journal Science. Language study often focuses on cultural factors, “but our work shows that language is also a biological phenomenon — you can’t fully separate culture and biology,” said Balthasar Bickel, a linguist at the University of Zurich and co-author of the new study. The researchers analyzed Stone Age and modern skulls and created simulations of how different jaw placements allow our mouths to make different sounds. They analyzed a database of roughly 2,000 languages — more than a quarter of languages in existence today — to identify which sounds were more and less frequently used, and where. Languages spoken by groups with hunter-gatherer societies in their more recent past are far less likely to use consonants used by longtime farming societies, the study found. “Our anatomy actually changed the types of sounds being incorporated into languages,” Noreen von Cramon-Taubadel, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Buffalo who was not involved in the study, wrote in an email. Before societies cultivated crops and learned to cook food, early humans chewed tough raw meat — which was hard work on our jaws and teeth. Stone Age adult skulls don’t look like modern skulls. These older skulls have upper and lower teeth closing directly on top of each other — whereas today most people have some degree of overbite, with the front teeth extending in front of bottom teeth when the mouth is closed. “If you are raised on softer foods, you don’t have the same kind of wear and tear on your bite that your ancestors had, so you keep an overbite,” said Bickel. Eating softer foods not only sets the jaw in a different fashion, but also changes which sounds are easily pronounced. In particular, it becomes much easier to say “f″ and “v,” which linguists call “labiodental” sounds. (Try it. Put your upper and lower incisors — or “front teeth” — directly on top of each other and try say “favor.” It’s difficult.) The researchers looked closely at 52 languages from what is called the Indo-European language group — including dialects spoken from Iceland to India — and charted how the “f″ and “v″ sounds appeared in a rising number of languages over time. As more societies developed agriculture and traded in raw meat for softer fare — whether it’s cooked meat and potatoes, or rice and stewed vegetables — these sounds became more common, the researchers found. “New sounds get introduced into languages, and then are more widely adopted,” said Steven Moran, also a linguist at the University of Zurich and co-author of the paper. The notion that agriculture shaped language was first suggested decades ago by American linguist Charles Hockett, but he did not attempt to prove it. Elan Dresher, a linguist at the University of Toronto who was not involved in the study, commended testing Hockett’s theory, but said the research could be fine-tuned by looking at historical reconstructions of languages, rather than using language databases to make comparisons. ___ The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

The way you speak now was shaped by what your ancestors ate.