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]: With a bumper crop of blacklegged ticks possible this season, researchers in a Lyme disease-plagued part of New York's Hudson Valley are tackling tick problems across entire neighborhoods with fungal sprays and bait boxes. The $8.8 million, five-year project aims to find out if treating 24 neighborhoods in Dutchess County for ticks, also known as deer ticks, can significantly reduce cases of Lyme disease and other tick-borne illnesses. "We want to do a better job and actually remove the threat from the neighborhoods, from the places where people are actually exposed to infected ticks," said Richard Ostfeld, a disease ecologist with the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, about 70 miles (110 kilometers) north of New York City. Dutchess County is a patchwork of forests, rolling farmland and thick residential developments that has long been a hotbed of Lyme disease. Tick checks are a common end-of-day routine here, as are inspections for the red, target-shaped rashes associated with tick bites. People spray on tick repellents, treat their clothes with insecticide and even spray their yards. But Ostfeld notes that spraying individual lawns has not proved effective in fighting Lyme disease. So he's scaling up from one backyard to many. The Tick Project involves more than 900 families in neighborhoods that consist of about 30 to 50 participants. Yards are being treated in the spring and early summer with a fungal spray that kills ticks. Researchers also are deploying bait boxes to attract rodents. An insecticide in the box kills any ticks on mice and chipmunks, two animals largely responsible for infecting ticks with the bacterium that causes Lyme disease. Researchers check in with families every two weeks in season to see whether anyone in the house, including cats and dogs, had ticks on them over the period. The Tick Project is funded mostly through a $5 million grant from the Steven & Alexandra Cohen Foundation, created by the hedge fund manager and his wife. Ostfeld said 2021 is set aside for data analysis, thought they will have some sense of early results within a year. Ostfeld would not divulge which neighborhoods are involved or who is participating, citing the need for privacy and of keeping good relations with participants. Edward Blundell, mayor of the village of Red Hook, mentioned during an interview that he had agreed to take part in the study. While he felt he could take personal steps to protect himself from Lyme disease, he would be satisfied if something comes out of the research. "Let's let the scientists look at this and give them a mini-lab site here, so we felt our yard could be the mini-site," Blundell said. Tick researchers say such area-wide studies are complex and difficult to do. They are costly. It can be hard to get all the needed permissions. And variabilities in tick densities over study areas can make the science challenging. Thomas Mather, director of the Tick Encounter Resource Center at the University of Rhode Island, said executing a well-designed study large enough to produce valid results is a "Holy Grail" of tick researchers. Phillip Baker, executive director of the American Lyme Disease Foundation, said the neighborhood approach sounded like a good one but noted that ticks are a resilient parasite. "Ticks have been around for a long, long time," Baker said, "and there's no real easy approach to get rid of them."
[A]: Tick towns: Researchers target neighborhoods in Lyme effort.

[Q]: Calyxt Inc, an eight-year-old firm co-founded by a genetics professor, altered the genes of a soybean plant to produce healthier oil using the cutting-edge editing technique rather than conventional genetic modification. Seventy-eight farmers planted those soybeans this spring across 17,000 acres in South Dakota and Minnesota, a crop expected to be the first gene-edited crop to sell commercially, beating out Fortune 500 companies. Seed development giants such as Monsanto, Syngenta AG and DowDuPont Inc have dominated genetically modified crop technology that emerged in the 1990s. But they face a wider field of competition from start-ups and other smaller competitors because gene-edited crops have drastically lower development costs and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has decided not to regulate them. Relatively unknown firms including Calyxt, Cibus, and Benson Hill Biosystems are already advancing their own gene-edited projects in a race against Big Ag for dominance of the potentially transformational technology. "It's a very exciting time for such a young company," said Calyxt CEO Federico Tripodi, who oversees 45 people. "The fact a company so small and nimble can accomplish those things has picked up interest in the industry." Gene-editing technology involves targeting specific genes in a single organism and disrupting those linked to undesirable characteristics or altering them to make a positive change. Traditional genetic modification, by contrast, involves transferring a gene from one kind of organism to another, a process that still does not have full consumer acceptance. Gene-editing could mean bigger harvests of crops with a wide array of desirable traits - better-tasting tomatoes, low-gluten wheat, apples that don't turn brown, drought-resistant soybeans or potatoes better suited for cold storage. The advances could also double the $15 billion global biotechnology seed market within a decade, said analyst Nick Anderson of investment bank Berenberg. The USDA has fielded 23 inquiries about whether gene-edited crops need regulation and decided that none meet its criteria for oversight. That saves their developers years of time and untold amounts of money compared to traditional genetically modified crops. Of those 23 organisms, just three were being developed by major agriculture firms. The newly competitive landscape could foster more partnerships and licensing deals between big and small firms, along with universities or other public research institutions, said Monsanto spokeswoman Camille Lynne Scott. Monsanto - which was recently acquired by Bayer AG - invested $100 million in startup Pairwise Plants this year to accelerate development of gene-edited plants. North Carolina-based Benson Hill, founded in 2012 and named after two scientists, mainly licenses crop technology to other companies. But it decided to produce its own higher-yielding corn plant because of the low development costs, said Chief Executive Matt Crisp. Calyxt plans to sell the oil from its gene-edited soybeans to food companies and has a dozen more gene-edited crops in the pipeline, including high-fiber wheat and potatoes that stay fresh longer. Developing and marketing a traditional genetically modified crop might easily cost $150 million, which only a few large companies can afford, Crisp said. With gene-editing, that cost might fall as much as 90 percent, he said. "We're seeing a huge number of organizations interested in gene-editing," Crisp said, referring to traditional crop-breeding companies, along with technology firms and food companies. "That speaks to the power of the technology and how we're at a pivotal point in time to modernize the food system." Supporters of gene-editing say it allows a higher level of precision than traditional modification. With CRISPR, one popular type of gene-editing technology used by Syngenta, scientists transfer an RNA molecule and an enzyme into a crop cell. When the RNA encounters a targeted strand of DNA inside the cell, it binds to it and the enzyme creates a break in the cell's DNA. Then, the cell repairs the broken DNA in ways that disrupt or improve the gene. (For a graphic on how the Syngenta process works, see: tmsnrt.rs/2KJmtxr ) Biotech firms hope the technology can avoid the "Frankenfood" label that critics have pinned on traditional genetically modified crops. But acceptance by regulators and the public globally remains uncertain. The Court of Justice of the European Union ruled on July 25 that gene-editing techniques are subject to regulations governing genetically modified crops. The ruling will limit gene-editing in Europe to research and make it illegal to grow commercial crops. The German chemical industry association called the decision "hostile to progress." U.S. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue blasted the ruling for enacting unnecessary barriers to innovation and stigmatizing gene-editing technology by subjecting it to the EU's "regressive and outdated" regulations governing genetically modified crops. The USDA also has no current plans to regulate gene-editing in animal products, according to a document provided by the agency. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, however, plans to regulate gene-editing in both plants and animals, FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb wrote in a June blog post. The agency is developing an "innovative and nimble" approach to regulating gene-editing, he wrote, that will aim to ensure its safety for both humans and animals while allowing companies to bring beneficial products to market. The USDA, by contrast, chose not to regulate gene-edited crops because the process typically introduces characteristics that are "indistinguishable" from those created through traditional plant breeding, which take much longer, USDA Secretary Perdue said in a March statement. Although there has been no widespread consumer resistance to gene-editing, activists who have long opposed genetically modified crops remain suspicious of any sort of tinkering with DNA. The new technique raises risks of creating undesired changes in the food supply and warrants increased regulation, said Lucy Sharratt, coordinator of the Canadian Biotechnology Action Network. That kind of opposition is why agribusiness giant Cargill Inc [CARG.UL] is pursuing gene-edited technology with caution, said Randal Giroux, the firm's vice-president of food safety, quality and regulatory affairs. Cargill announced in February that it would collaborate with Precision BioSciences to develop healthier canola oil, but is proceeding slowly on agreements to store and transport other companies' gene-edited crops pending clarity from regulators, Giroux said. "We really do want to see gene-editing evolve in the marketplace," Giroux said. "We're watching to see how consumers adopt these products and react to these products." SECRET FIELD-TESTING Other major agriculture biotech firms are moving more aggressively, hoping to take advantage of lighter regulation to speed development. A gene-edited crop may take five years to move from development to commercialization in the United States, compared with a genetically modified crop that could take 12 years, said Dan Dyer, head of seeds development at Syngenta. The firm is working on better-tasting tomatoes that take longer to spoil and hopes to launch a gene-edited crop in the mid-2020s, said Jeff Rowe, Syngenta's president of global seeds. DowDuPont - at a secret location in the U.S. Midwest - is field-testing waxy corn, a variety grown for industrial purposes that has been edited for higher yields. The company plans a commercial launch next spring. Smaller firms will be nipping at the heels of these massive companies in the race to bring the next generation of genetically engineered foods to market, said Robert Wager, a biology faculty member at Vancouver Island University. "The lack of USDA-regulated status is a huge game-changer," he said, "for universities and small startups to enter the market."
[A]: Gene-editing startups ignite the next 'Frankenfood' fight.

[Q]: "Unemployment payments have been a big point of concern in Wisconsin since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. Hundreds of thousands of Wisconsinites were laid off or furloughed due to the health crisis, putting intense pressure on the state's unemployment insurance system. And since March 2020, a backlog of unpaid unemployment claims has led to Wisconsinites facing difficult choices when it comes to paying rent, car payments and other bills. As people wait -- some for more than three months -- Republican lawmakers and others have criticized the state Department of Workforce Development, the agency responsible for paying unemployment benefits. Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, is one of them. In a June 9, 2020 Facebook post, Vos included an image that listed all 50 states with Wisconsin as the last one to start paying out federal unemployment compensation benefits under the CARES Act, which was signed by President Donald Trump at the end of March. In the image, Wisconsin is listed as starting to make federal PUC payments on April 29, 2020, just behind Connecticut, which is listed as starting its payments three days earlier. At the top: Illinois, listed as starting April 6, 2020 -- more than three weeks before Wisconsin. PUC stands for Pandemic Unemployment Compensation, though most may know this as the extra payments -- generally $600 -- offered by the federal government. Is Vos right, that Wisconsin residents were the last to get those payments? When asked for backup, Vos' office provided a link to a study by the Hamilton Project, part of the Brookings Institute, a Washington, D.C. nonprofit research group . That study is the genesis of the list Vos shared, and reflects the same results. The study -- and Vos' list -- specifically focuses on the PUC payments, but there is another program to add to our alphabet soup: The PUA, or Pandemic Unemployment Assistance. Those payments are available to people who wouldn't normally qualify for unemployment. While Wisconsin was the final state to start making the PUC payments, the same study showed the state fared better on the PUA ones. The state began processing those applications April 21, 2020, with payments starting a week later -- much earlier than some states. On those payments, Nevada came in last, not processing applications until mid-May, according to the study. Wisconsin ranked nearer to the top of that list, with the earliest processing dates starting on April 13 in Alabama and Texas. Ben Jedd, communications director for the state Department of Workforce Development, acknowledged the state was last to make the enhanced unemployment payments. He blamed the state's old computer system, as has Democratic Gov. Tony Evers. Jedd also said the delay was caused, in part, by the timing of action by Vos and other Republican Legislative leaders in scheduling a vote to suspend a one-week waiting period typically required for newly unemployed Wisconsinites. In late May, Republican leaders in the Senate and Assembly didn't immediately schedule a floor session to take up a package backed by Evers, which included waiving the waiting period. Instead, Republicans waited three weeks for the session, causing the state to miss out on $25 million from the CARES Act to help pay for unemployment benefits. ""The reason DWD was the last to pay FPUC is the length of time it took to program our COBOL software and the fact that we had to wait for the legislation repealing the waiting week to be passed to complete programming for that change before we could begin,"" Jedd said. He also noted Wisconsin fared better on the PUA program. But that program applies to far fewer people, and the image shared by Vos makes clear that the last-in-the-nation ranking applies to the PUC payments. Vos claimed Wisconsin was the last state to pay out COVID-related federal unemployment money. He is on target about that, but the claim fails to note two important factors: Delays by Republicans played a role in the poor showing by Wisconsin, and the state fared better when it came to payments from a related federal program. Our definition for is ""The statement is accurate but needs clarification or additional information."" That fits here."
[A]:
Wisconsin was the last state to start paying COVID-related federal unemployment benefits.