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.

Q: On 1 June 2018, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics announced a proposed “Significant New Use Rule” (SNUR) for asbestos, a mineral once widely used in the construction of buildings due to its flame-retardant properties but now uncontroversially considered a carcinogen. The necessity for such a rule, in general, stems from the fact that not all uses of asbestos are currently banned; some of them remain unregulated thanks to a 1991 court ruling. The asbestos uses the 2018 SNUR applies to are ones that had not been banned by earlier regulations and remained in active use at the time of the 1991 court ruling, but are no longer in use due to users’ desires to avoid contracting cancer or liability for causing cancer in others. The EPA refers to these uses as “currently unregulated former uses.” SNURs are a mechanism within the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) that mandate specific EPA approval when a chemical is used in a significantly new way or in a significantly new mixture that “might create concerns.”: For asbestos, [the] EPA is proposing a SNUR for certain uses of asbestos (including asbestos-containing goods) that would require manufacturers and importers to receive EPA approval before starting or resuming manufacturing, and importing or processing of asbestos. This review process would provide EPA with the opportunity to evaluate the intended use of asbestos and, when necessary, take action to prohibit or limit the use. The TSCA is currently undergoing a major overhaul that began under the Obama administration and was reinterpreted in radically divergent ways under the Trump administration. When former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt (a Trump appointee who resigned amid accusations of misconduct) explained the proposed SNUR for asbestos, he described it as part of an “unprecedented” set of new protections against the dangers of asbestos which require manufacturers “to receive EPA approval before starting or resuming manufacturing, and importing or processing of asbestos”. In their correspondence with us, the EPA stated that the proposed rule serves “to ensure that the manufacture, import, or processing for the currently unregulated former uses of asbestos identified in the rule are prohibited unless reviewed and approved by EPA.” According to critics, the problem with this position is twofold. The first problem concerns the way in which the current EPA has written the SNUR, which EPA staffers have privately worried does not allow for the ban of all currently inactive unregulated uses but instead only concerns 15 specific uses the EPA “believes” to be comprehensive and thus could allow for the continued legality of some now dormant uses. The second problem concerns the way in which the EPA has proposed to evaluate the risk of these “currently unregulated former uses”. In May 2018, the EPA published a document known as the “Problem Formulation of the Risk Evaluation for Asbestos,” which establishes the scientific approach the EPA will take in evaluating these new uses. Significantly, their approach will not include information from existing (or “legacy”) uses of asbestos, despite the significant body of work around health risks stemming from those uses: In the case of asbestos, legacy uses, associated disposals, and legacy disposals will be excluded from the problem formulation and risk evaluation … These include asbestos containing materials that remain in older buildings or are part of older products but for which manufacture, processing and distribution in commerce are not currently intended, known or reasonably foreseen. EPA is excluding these activities because EPA generally interprets the mandates under section TSCA § 6(a)-(b) to conduct risk evaluations and any corresponding risk management to focus on uses for which manufacture, processing or distribution is intended, known to be occurring, or reasonably foreseen, rather than reaching back to evaluate the risks associated with legacy uses, associated disposal, and legacy disposal, and interprets the definition of conditions of use in that context. E&E News reported that this approach may serve to severely limit the types of exposures the EPA will consider when formulating the potential risk of new uses for asbestos: Public health advocates believe EPA is inappropriately limiting its health reviews of chemicals to avoid considering the impacts of those already in the environment. But the agency hasn’t been swayed by their pushback … That means the agency won’t consider the dangers posed by, for example, asbestos-containing tiles, adhesives and piping in millions of homes and commercial buildings nationwide. According to the New York Times, the new rules will serve to narrow the ways in which asbestos itself is defined as well: Other changes identified in the E.P.A. documents narrow the definitions of certain chemicals, including asbestos. Some asbestos-like fibers will not be included in the risk assessments, one agency staff member said, nor will the 8.8 million pounds a year of asbestos deposited in hazardous landfills or the 13.1 million pounds discarded in routine dump sites. Three former EPA officials, including the former supervisor of the toxic chemical program, told the New York Times that such stipulations would necessarily create flawed analyses of the threat posed by any chemical currently being re-evaluated by the EPA: Three former agency officials, including a former supervisor of the toxic chemical program, said that the E.P.A.’s approach would result in a flawed analysis of the threat presented by chemicals. “It is ridiculous,” said Wendy Cleland-Hamnett, who retired last year after nearly four decades at the E.P.A., where she ran the toxic chemical unit during her last year. “You can’t determine if there is an unreasonable risk without doing a comprehensive risk evaluation” … The most likely outcome of the changes will be that the agency finds lower levels of risks associated with many chemicals, and as a result, imposes fewer new restrictions or prohibitions, several current and former agency officials said. Senator Tom Udall, a Democrat from New Mexico, argued that former EPA head Scott Pruitt was undermining a bipartisan push to reform the TSCA that began under President Obama. “Congress worked hard in bipartisan fashion to reform our nation’s broken chemical safety laws, but Pruitt’s E.P.A. is failing to put the new law to use as intended,” he said in a statement. President Trump spoke on the topic of asbestos long before his election to the White House. In his 1997 book The Art of the Comeback, Trump argued that the chemical is actually safe once applied and suggested that the link to health problems was manufactured by mob-connected companies which perform asbestos removal: “I believe that the movement against asbestos was led by the mob, because it was often mob-related companies that would do the asbestos removal. Great pressure was put on politicians, and as usual, the politicians relented.” While it is true that the uses of asbestos discussed in the 2018 SNUR are currently legal, their health and litigation risks have rendered them effectively dead. The current administration has established a process for some of those uses to be granted formal approval by the EPA if they pass a safety review many scientists find flawed. For these reasons, we concur with the leaked opinion of EPA lawyer Mark Seltzer, an attorney advisor to the EPA Chemical Risk and Reporting Enforcement Branch who worked on the SNUR and concluded that: “This new approach allows asbestos-containing products that are not currently used to be used in the future.”

A: The Environmental Protection Agency will allow new asbestos products to enter the market.
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Q: Researchers, who studied about 1,000 teens who said they wanted to quit smoking, wrote in the journal Pediatrics that close to 11 percent of those who got counseling for three months had quit smoking, compared to six percent of those who only received educational pamphlets. “A school nurse-delivered smoking-cessation intervention proved feasible and effective in improving short-term abstinence among adolescent boys and short-term reductions in smoking amount and frequency in both genders,” wrote study author Lori Pbert of the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester. But a year after the sessions, there was no difference in smoking rates based on what kind of assistance teens had gotten from their nurses. In addition, fewer than one in five teens said they hadn’t smoked recently. “It’s nice that there was some effect at three months, what we really care about is sustained cessation,” said Michael Siegel, who studies tobacco control at the Boston University School of Public health but wasn’t involved in the study. “The overwhelming majority of these kids are not quitting.”   In the 35 Massachusetts schools covered in the study, half the nurses were trained to give their students one-on-one counseling based around goal setting and problem solving, including making a plan to quit and then preventing relapses. The other nurses gave students information pamphlets on quitting smoking and volunteered to answer any questions they had about the process. Both groups of nurses saw their students at four weekly sessions, ranging from 10 to 30 minutes. The counseling intervention appeared to especially help boys in the short run. Those who had made goals and tracked progress with the nurses were three times more likely to say they had stopped smoking than boys in the “control” group. But between 13 and 17 percent of both boys and girls reported they had stopped lighting up a year later, regardless of whether or not they had received counseling. Other smoking cessation experts noted that relapsing into smoking is the biggest hurdle at any age, and that teens were especially likely to do so. But they added that the more options teens had for help, the better. SOURCE: bit.ly/o4z0xc

A: Study: can school nurses help teens quit smoking?.
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Q: They also announced that, thanks to a crowdfunding campaign, they’d produced the genome of Lil BUB, a female cat with a large internet following. That followed a notable advance in January: an improved genome for the axolotl, a salamander renowned for regrowing severed limbs and other body parts. Scientists have been uncovering genomes for quite a while. The first from an animal — a worm — came in 1998. Now, the technology has advanced far enough that scientists last year announced a project to produce the genomes for all life forms on Earth other than bacteria and single-celled organisms called archaea. They called it a “moonshot for biology.” But what’s the point of uncovering new genomes? For scientists, a detailed look under the hood of their favorite organism provides a foothold for learning the deepest secrets of their objects of attention, it leads to discoveries about how life works, and possibly how to prevent disease. Take the mosquito. Late last year, researchers published a much-improved description of the DNA code for a particularly dangerous species of mosquito: Aedes aegypti, notorious for spreading Zika, dengue and yellow fever. That achievement came from analyzing the DNA of 80 mosquito brothers. They were born in Leslie Vosshall’s lab at Rockefeller University in New York, where thousands of mosquitoes swarmed in cages recently as Krithika Venkataraman was trying to make some more. She stuck a tube that protruded from her mouth like a straw into a transparent cube filled with male mosquitoes. Then she repeatedly sucked about 30 males at a time into the tube. She counted them, and then blew them into another cube that housed females. Before long, the two sexes were mating. You can think of a genome as an instruction book for building a living thing. Its language is a four-letter alphabet, which stand for the four compounds that make up the innards of the DNA molecule. The order of those compounds along the molecule is the code; it creates “words” that we call genes. The mosquito genome, for example, is about 1.28 billion letters long, a bit less than half the length of the human version. Knowing the DNA sequence lets scientists manipulate it with gene editing techniques, said Ben Matthews of the Vosshall lab, who was part of the international team that published the refined description of the mosquito genome last November. And once researchers started analyzing that version of the DNA code, discoveries began to pop out. — They nearly doubled the known size of a family of genes that help mosquitoes sense information from their environment, such as the odor of humans. That was “totally, mind-blowingly, unexpected,” Vosshall said. (Vosshall’s salary is paid by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which also supports The Associated Press Health & Science Department.) Further study may reveal surprises about what mosquitoes pay attention to, Vosshall said. And that could lead to better lures for mosquito traps, as well as better repellents. Maybe scientists can find something “10,000 times more disgusting” to a mosquito than the old standby, DEET, she said. — They found new details about genes that let some mosquitoes resist certain insecticides. That’s a possible step toward predicting what insecticides would be useless for fighting certain populations, as well as a potential lead for coming up with new chemical weapons against the insect. — They found previously unknown targets for a major class of insecticides. That could open the door to designing new versions that target mosquitoes while sparing beneficial insects and posing less risk to people. — They narrowed the search for genetic variants that prevent some Aedes aegypti mosquitoes from infecting people with dengue, a severe flu-like illness that sickens millions every year. If those variants can be identified, scientists might use genetic engineering to reproduce them in some mosquitoes, which could then be released to spread the variants though wild populations, Vosshall  said. Those variants, or others, might also work for reducing threats of spreading Zika and yellow fever, Vosshall and Matthews said. — A similar strategy might be used to make mosquito populations overproduce males. That would reduce mosquito bites in the short term — only females bite — and open the door to shrinking wild populations through genetic engineering. The new genome revealed details of the DNA stretch that makes mosquitoes develop as males, which Matthews called “step one” in pursuing the make-more-males strategy. The salamander genome published in January built on a previous publication by European scientists last year. Although its genome is about 10 times the size of the human one, which makes the analysis harder, the axolotl’s regenerating capabilities are an obvious lure. Axolotls can replace “almost anything you can cut off of them, as long as you don’t cut off their heads,” says Jeramiah Smith of the University of Kentucky in Lexington, an author of the more recent genome paper. But Smith points to another trick that might pay off sooner for human medicine: The salamander can also heal large wounds without scarring. As for learning how to let people grow back a severed arm, he figures that’s a long way off. “That probably won’t be useful for me,” joked Smith, who’s 42. “I’ll be dead, so I won’t need to grow my arm back.” And Lil BUB ? She’s the size of a kitten even though she’s 8 years old, and has a number of other odd traits. Scientists looked for genetic mutations, and found altered genes that appear to be responsible for her extra toes and for a rare bone disease. ___ Follow Malcolm Ritter at @MalcolmRitter. ___ The Associated Press Health & Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

A:
Science Says: Why scientists prize plant, animal genomes.
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