More Ohioans, 2.2 million, have already cast their vote this election, surpassing the 2016 early vote count of 1.8 million. Voting by absentee ballot has doubled from 2016, and voting in person has more than tripled from four years ago.

An artificial intelligence service that’s free and available on the web can transform clothed images of women into nudes with life-like accuracy, including breasts and genitalia. The so-called deepfakes are made without the women’s consent. And their faces are clearly visible.

The Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center at The Ohio State University has embarked on a fundraising campaign to preserve its collection of ice core samples for future generations of scientists. Like rings of a tree, the frozen cylinders provide a climatological record stretching back hundreds of thousands of years.

In 2016, Donald Trump won the state of Ohio by eight percentage points. This time around, the Buckeye State is a real tossup, attracting the candidates and their ilk to make their pitches in the final days before the Nov. 3 election.

The human nose is a powerful tool that provides crucial information about the sea of scents that surround us. Our sense of smell has taken on new importance during the pandemic, with temporary loss of olfactory sense being a common symptom of COVID-19.

A Washington Post survey this summer found that people’s reading habits are closely tied to the reality of living during a pandemic and a racial reckoning. Top picks, books about race and social justice. Also popular, books about dystopian societies, pandemics, and self-help books.

This episode originally aired on Oct. 20, 2020. American voters don’t elect a president on November 3. They vote to decide which political party electors will cast their state’s vote in the Electoral College. The present system has been in place since 1804 and has come under increasing scrutiny because the process enables an election to the presidency without a majority of the popular vote. That’s how Donald Trump won in 2016.

This October offers up some spectacular naked-eye views of our brightest planetary neighbors, such as Venus, Jupiter, and Saturn. But the star of the show is Mars, which swoops in for its closest approach to Earth until 2035.

Columbus voters will decide on Nov. 3 whether to amend the city’s charter to enable a civilian review board. It is the only large metropolitan area in the country without one. But not all civilian review boards are the same.

The pandemic has upset the usual protocol for voting and created political fights out of logistical issues. Voters have requested a record 2.7 million absentee ballots, many for the first time. The onslaught that has brought questions, confusion and errors.